While this blog does apparently get quite a few hits (over 1,000 some months), I’m not going to be using it anymore since I no longer really like the way I’ve managed it. I”ll be starting up a more anonymous blog somewhere else with a title that I hopefully like better. Sorry guys!

I’ll leave this husk of a blog for the internet denizens to peruse, since there still is some useful information – mostly just that tidbit about the bluetooth in a particular model of compaq’s laptops that were shipped one christmas season… but in any case, there will be no new articles or updates. I might clean up the XP: Tablet Edition install How-To, or maybe just post the updated version at my new blog.

I just finished watching “Sicko” (Michael Moore’s new documentary on the American health-care system). It’s definitely his best yet. I’ll admit to crying some during this movie. Why does the U.S. have it so wrong on this issue?! I want my universal health-care! And a government employee hired to do my laundry for free!

And, as you’ve probably guessed, I did download this off bittorent. It hasn’t been released in theaters yet, only ‘leaked’ on the internet. Translation: internet buzz marketing.

Anyway, I recommend watching this. It’s worth it. Go torrent it.

Yep, I’ll admit to watching So You Think You Can Dance. It’s a pretty awesome show – I watch it whenever I catch it on TV. Last night I saw one of the coolest and most unique routines that was “pop jazz” genre. The dancers, Sara and Jesus, did a great job of performing it. I couldn’t resist putting it up! So here they are:

I happened to run across Danah Boyd’s blog apophenia, and in particular a post about a conference called “Just The Facts About Online Youth Victimization”. I watched the youtube playlist (about 1 1/2 hrs). This is solid information that everyone should know – not especially kids or parents – just everyone. According to these leading researchers, the TV media’s popularized image of online predators is horribly misrepresentative of the majority of statutory rape cases, and there is a vast social dynamic to be studied. These people know their shit.

Please, watch the playlist. If nothing else, check out the transcript (PDF) on apophenia’s post. I cannot begin to tell you how right on these people are.

Last night I saw a totally awesome dance routine on So You Think You Can Dance. It was done by Sara & Jesus (couple #6 for that night), and was under the “Pop Jazz” genre, whatever that means. I couldn’t resist posting it once it showed up on youtube:

I happened across http://www.shelleytherepublican.com/ today since Friendly Atheist linked to it in a recent post. This has got to be one of the scariest militant intolerant conservative blogs I’ve ever seen. I really wonder if someone could really be self-deceived enough to belief some of the content of the posts there.

If you want to get some good footage of a nuclear plant in the U.S., dress like an american tourist.

Also, if you want access top secret documents at those nuclear facilities, just admit that your smoking pot and drinking even though you’re underage.

It’s 4/20. Time to pay some respect:

I’m bisexual. Let’s get that out in the open for starters.

I was raised in the Seventh Day Adventist Church (www.sda.org). The SDA Church has a standing policy that those who have same-gender sex (e.g., “practicing” homosexuals or bisexuals in homo- relations of that sort) are not allowed to be members of the church. While I am not “practicing”, in this sense, I still consider this stance to be ridiculous, and it is my grounds for withdrawing my membership from the church.

The following is my diatribe on why I consider this policy to be ridiculous:

1. It is predicated on the belief that same-gender sex is a sin.

This is debatable at best. There are quite a few texts in the bible that appear quite straightforward in their meaning – men should not have sex with men. The opening chapter of Romans is a good example of this (see verses 22-28). While these do appear clear in their intent, I do not believe they have been correctly interpreted in the context of a modern homosexual relationship. There’s quite a bit of literature online that discusses this particular point of interpretation, and from what I can tell there is greater academic veracity in the viewpoint of the New/Old Testament writers condemning gay sex in pagan temples, rather than a modern monogamous homosexual relationship. If nothing else, it is of equal veracity with the plain-text interpretation, in which case we should suspend judgment of the issue since neither is clearly the correct one.

See this website, “What the Bible Says – and Doesn’t Say, about Homosexuality”. There is also a direct link to a PDF of the 24-page booklet.

I would also recommend reading ReligiousTolerance.org’s treatment of the “The Bible and Homosexuality”.

2. The reasoning behind tossing out a member because they are a “sinner” is specious and hypocritical. Not to mention, the salvation model is a little confusing.

Let’s model the basic logic behind what is considered an acceptable member of the SDA church in a simple pseudo-computer program. I know this is oversimplified. However, if you can show me why it is not an *accurate* model of how this reasoning works, and why it should be considered non-specious, then please contact me.

‘Person’='Joe’

if ‘Joe has same gender attractions’ == TRUE

and ‘Joe has same-gender sex’ == FALSE

then ‘Membership’ == TRUE”

This is essentially the stance of the SDA church. You can have same-sex attractions, as long as you don’t act on them as a lifestyle (e.g., you choose to ’sin’ on a regular basis). If you do have sex, you’re a sinner, and we can’t have that in the church. Except:

‘Person’='Joe’

if ‘Joe has temptations to eat too much’ == TRUE

and ‘Joe eats too much, and is overweight’ == TRUE

then ‘Membership’ == TRUE

The bible has passages in which it condemns gluttony as a sin – especially as a lifestyle. But overweight members in the church are not condemned for being overweight, nor asked to leave the church. Granted, there are programs in place to help people lose weight because we want people to be in a good state of health, but simply having a lifestyle of overeating does not prompt anyone to ask fat people to leave the church. Of course, this entire analogy depends also upon the idea that same-gender sex is also bad, which was repudiated in the previous point.

If overeating is acceptable, but same-gender sex not, then we clearly have a sliding scale of what sins are “really bad” and what sins are “not too bad”. Sins are not equal.

But really, what is sin? In the most basic sense, it is separation from God. This is why christian doctrine contains the concept of “original sin” – that the sin of Adam and Eve was passed down to the offspring, and that we are inherently disconnected from God – and thus sinners – from birth.

So then, what’s the fundamental difference between someone who does not act on temptations of what we consider to be ‘bad’, and the person who does? Both are sinners, since both have original sin on their shoulders. I would hypothesize that an Adventist would say that the person who acts on temptations is choosing to stay separated from god, and in this sense is not saved. The person who only has original sin, and only commits “not too bad” sins can be saved despite their ‘bad’ lifestyle because they can claim Christ as their saviour.

From this I would conclude that Adventists have a fundamental goal of ‘closeness’/'connectedness’ to god, and that they believe there is a sliding scale in the distance of disconnection between a given person and god. This seems reasonable, except that on a fundamental level we have not been given a criterion from god of what is a more or less acceptable sin (except, perhaps, the “unforgivable sin”). This is where we have entered the realm of subjective judgment, where one acts off of the feelings of one’s guts and the current political climate. I would say any reasoning as to what is more or less acceptable is specious by this very fact of a lack of objective or authoritative criterion.

I would say “Judge not, lest ye be judged”. Else, “Judge, and prepare to be judged”. Your pick. I think I’ll go with the former.

Conclusion

So let’s do a recap:

1. Same-gender sex is clearly not prohibited in the bible in specific contexts, and it does not talk at all about a modern monogamous homosexual relationship.

2. For someone to judge another on their actions as worse than their own is bigoted and specious in their reasoning by virtue of subjectivity. Why are you judging people anyway?

————

Just for the sake of a point of reference, here’s the

Official Seventh Day Adventist Position Statement on Homosexuality

“The Seventh-day Adventist Church recognizes that every human being is valuable in the sight of God, and we seek to minister to all men and women in the spirit of Jesus. We also believe that by God’s grace and through the encouragement of the community of faith, an individual may live in harmony with the principles of God’s Word.

Seventh-day Adventists believe that sexual intimacy belongs only within the marital relationship of a man and a woman. This was the design established by God at creation. The Scriptures declare: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24, NIV). Throughout Scripture this heterosexual pattern is affirmed. The Bible makes no accommodation for homosexual activity or relationships. Sexual acts outside the circle of a heterosexual marriage are forbidden (Lev. 20:7-21; Rom. 1:24-27; 1 Cor. 6:9-11). Jesus Christ reaffirmed the divine creation intent: “‘Haven’t you read,’ he replied, ‘that at the beginning the Creator “made them male and female,” and said, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh?” So they are no longer two, but one’” (Matt. 19:4-6, NIV). For these reasons Adventists are opposed to homosexual practices and relationships.

Seventh-day Adventists endeavor to follow the instruction and example of Jesus. He affirmed the dignity of all human beings and reached out compassionately to persons and families suffering the consequences of sin. He offered caring ministry and words of solace to struggling people, while differentiating His love for sinners from His clear teaching about sinful practices.

This statement was voted during the Annual Council of the General Conference Executive Committee on Sunday, October 3, 1999 in Silver Spring, Maryland.”

Essentially, love the sinner, hate the sin. All who are attracted to homosexual relationships should deny themselves. Heterosexual domestic partnerships are the only kind that were instituted by God in the Bible, and therefore should be the only kind that we have in modern society.

I’ve been reading the blog “Et tu, Jen?” for a few months since I discovered it. She is one of the few theists I have found that can articulate her beliefs in a cogent manner that doesn’t insult the intelligence of an atheist or agnostic. This is primarily because she is a former atheist, turned catholic. Her conversion story is interesting, but more interesting at the moment is an entry she posted today about someone else’s story – John C. Wright.

I identify with John in many ways – reason is important in the decision process, logic is a tool, there are some problems with defining what is supernatural since it is something of an oxymoron given a framework of naturalism. His conversion brought up a question that Jen addressed earlier on her blog, though I never had time to resolve some of the problems raised by it:

Is there any proof/event/circumstance that would allow a discerning, reasonable person to believe in a god?

This is an important question, since the fundamental assertion of most agnostics (and hopefully most atheists/freethinkers/etc.) is that they are open to the possibility of a god existing, but have not seen sufficient evidence to believe so. If there is a systemic bias in our process of reasoning/philosophy that cannot logically allow the possibility of discovering a god, then we run in to a quandary. God could then exist and would be undiscoverable to the reasoning person. This is a bias that is inexcusable if we are to consider reason to be important simultaneously and equally with being open to the possibility of theism.

At the same time, I think it is worth examining the question of how such a system would logically exclude god. Does this system exclude god because he is logically contradictory as a concept (e.g., excluded for a good reason), or simply because the logical structures/arguments themselves contain a bias introduced by someone who doesn’t want to believe in god?

This brings me to the scrutiny of John’s personal conversion experience: He claims various miraculous non-coincidences (providence?) which I can concede for the sake of the argument. God caused them. Would they be enough to convince me? Would I have to go through the same experience to be convinced myself? This is one problem I’ve been considering myself. Could someone else’s conversion story that measures up to the standard of what it would take to convince me personally if it happened to me be capable of convincing me vicariously through their experience? This story comes close, but there are a few things that leave me niggling with suspicion that perhaps his claim to rigorous thought and consideration is not as it seems:

• John characterizes atheism/agnosticism as shallow; christianity as mature, developed. This is something that happens when anyone sees a more enlightened or alternative view that also makes sense under a particular framework of thought – it’s a revelation of sorts, but I don’t know where he gets the idea it is more mature. I think the level and complexity of thought is fairly equal on both sides of the debate here, though there are immature thinkers on both sides as well. I think such characterizations are really irrelevant to the conversation: show me your proof, not your impressions.
• John places great importance on having arrived at a conclusion. He uses a lot of language about judgment, finding the truth (of atheism at one time, now disilliusioned of this into christianity), having found a conclusion, etc. – all of which I consider hogwash from my personally agnostic perspective. Though of course agnosticism is a position I take provisionally – e.g., it’s the best I can come up with right now, though I don’t consider it the ultimate solution or appropriate position once all is said and done. I have a long way to go in philosophy myself, but it seems to me that he reached a lot of conclusions early in his search, which raises suspicion that his search was not thorough/comprehensive/rigorous as he claims it.
• Primary reasons for conversion have to do with a question presented to him recently about whether his axioms could allow for the possibility of god in the first place. He seems to not have run into this question after “35 years of study” in philosophy. I’ve run into it after less than 3 years. While this is no claim to personal thoroughness, I think 3 decades is a long time to not run into the question of whether your framework of axioms allows for a god or not, since this is a fundamental test of the framework’s propositional flexibility.

But still, I come back to the test which he used: ask God for a sign, and have it granted. This is my test also, though he was convinced by a heart attack in close proximity to the prayer – I consider this to be a very natural and probable event considering that the number one killer in the U.S. is “diseases of the circulatory system” (read: heart attacks!) according to WHO mortality data.

In any case, some of the things he later mentions I find more convincing – visions and religious experiences that I trust he is being honest in saying they were not hallucinations or dreams. If this is true, then he has a case on his hands for me. Still, as he mentioned before, there are things which force me to think that he is simply deluding himself in some way. As one of Hume’s principles goes, it is more likely that there is some rational explanation such as delusion or hallucination, than that a witness’s story of a divine miracle is really true in the ontological sense (i.e., it really happened that way, they perceived the event correctly as supernatural). I guess this answers one of my earlier questions: It is unlikely I will be convinced by a vicariously described conversion experience. I need my own.

Back to the more important question though: does my own framework of belief, basic set of axioms, logically preclude the possibility of god on grounds which are acceptable? By acceptable, I mean that the possibility is not precluded because of an inadvertant (or perhaps even purposeful) systemic bias in the logic/argument created by a human who is unsure of god’s existence?

I’m not entirely sure. I still have to answer the question of how I could be convinced. It is difficult to imagine since I really don’t have a conception of god that really makes logical sense to me, other than a deistic/benign one. Food for thought….

Right now I’m taking CHEM 112 at Idaho State University. As part of the lab section, we’re given 6 periods (1 period a week, 3 hours) to prepare an interactive presentation/demonstration for a K-8 class. The long and short of the rules is that it has to be a “discovery” / interactive type presentation, and can’t include using toxic chemicals or flames. That takes most of the fun out of it, eh?

Not so fast! I was lucky enough to remember reading in my chemistry textbook about supersaturated solutions of sodium acetate. Dropping in a seed crystal of supersaturated solution will make it form a crystal from the seed that grows and slows in 30 seconds. I thought this would be really neat for a demonstration, so my lab group has been working on a presentation surrounding crystals and chemical structure.

A bit of advice / information on preparing a crystallization solution that I’ve gathered from the ‘net and personal experience

In order to get such a solution, it has to be heated to increase the solubility of water. Dissolve as much as possible at the elevated temperature. When it cools, it remains in a liquid supersaturated state, even though normally the sodium acetate should come out of solution / not stay dissolved at room temperature. Such a solution is called a “supercooled” chemical melt – that is, a chemical which was melted into a liquid state and allowed to cool undisturbed so that it remains a liquid. Such solutions are unstable – if you provide any nucleation sites for crystallization (the chemical coming out of solution) then a solid crystal will quickly form.

Sodium acetate and sodium thiosulfate are two common chemicals that can be used for such a demonstration. In the case of sodium thiosulfate, you can just melt the solid crystalline form (pentahydrate is the most common commercially available option) with a microwave or a heat source such as a bunsen burner or hot plate. Adding a little water helps it to stay in a liquid form while it cools. Once it is back to nearly room temperature, this solution is ready. You can speed the cooling process after melting thiosulfate by putting the container in a larger container of cool water from the tap. If you use ice in the water bath, it is not likely to work… the solution gets too cold and thiosulfate comes out of solution. I’ve tried this in the lab with thiosulfate before – it’s a bit finnicky, but once it works it will have been all worth it.

There’s a few gootube vidoes that show this crystallization in action. Check them out with this google video search for “sodium acetate”.

This website recommended using sodium thiosulfate over other solutions since it tends to be more stable in it’s supercooled state. My lab group decided to do the demonstration with this chemical based on the author’s recommendation, and we haven’t tried the alternative of sodium acetate. I can’t say whether it’s more stable or not, but regardless of this, I’ve looked online and it appears that acetate is more expensive than thiosulfate anyway.

Ways to Acquire Sodium Thiosulfate

• Chlorine Neutralizer (granular Na-thiosulfate)

http://www.waterwarehouse.com/products/sku-1095.html

Doheny’s Water Warehouse
2.25 lbs = $14
9 lbs = $52

$10 handling fee, free 2-day shipping

There isn’t any information on the website about whether this is pure Na-thiosulfate or if it has some proprietary mix of chemicals.

• Sodium Thiosulfate pentahydrate – lab grade

http://secure.sciencecompany.com/Sodium-Thiosulfate-Pentahydrate-500g-P6376C0.aspx

Science Company
500g = $6.50

$7.21 shipping and handling ground (to zip code 83651)

I think the Science Company will be my preferred way to get this chemical. It’s lab-grade, cheap, and provided in 500 gram amounts which is plenty for a demonstration in a medium sized jar. They also provide a formal procedure for this lab demonstration on this page.

I just watched the “Near Death Experiences” (NDEs) episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit (S1 E12), and after seeing all those pilots and scientists in a centrifuge go into g-force induced loss of consciousness (g-LOC), it kind’ve made me want to try it myself. I wonder, where could one get a ticket to ride one of these to get the g-LOC experience?

According to the show, out of the total population about 18% will have an NDE when the blood supply gets cut off to the brain temporarily (they have to survive to tell about it at least). I think it’d be interesting to try – there wouldn’t seem to be any significant risks given that I’m a relatively healthy 19 year old kid.

In any case, I couldn’t find any companies online that will let you ride in a centrifuge for a price. Anyone know of some place where you can buy a ticket?

Last Saturday night, I came down with something – I’m not sure of what the cause was. Whatever it was, I ended up throwing up about 7-8 times over the course of 8 hours – I didn’t get much sleep that night.

The next day was largely a blurry, dehydrated confusion. I slept most of the day, and didn’t eat anything. A little searching on the ‘net for my symptoms (nausea, vomiting, diahrrea, headache) turned up a lot of articles on stomach flu. I was curious what the medical jargon for this would be, and found gastroentiritis to be the closest fit. Don’t think that this is self-diagnosis though – gastroentiritis is purely a descriptive term for a collection of symptoms; it does not necessarily have a specific pathology. Causes can include bacteria (food poisoning), viral infection (noroviruses are the most common), and other pre-existing medical conditions.

While I was in a daze for those two days, I was constantly wishing for this dreadful sickness to be over. At this point I am able to hold food down again and am perfectly fine – life resumes to normal. However, I can’t help but think about how there are many people in the world at this time who live with chronic diahrrea, or are at constant risk of food or water poisoning because they live in the third world. My brief experience with discomfort is mild compared to theirs; I had a comfortable bed to sleep in, hygienic facilities, and running water. Others in third world countries likely have few or none of these. I cannot imagine what this hell would be like, but it scares me that it exists, and for so many people.

What can we do about it?

I happened across a headline from the Scientific American RSS Feed that said “Blog: Stanford Prison Experiment Videos on Youtube”. I’d read about this experiment before, and I find that generally a documentary video can be a good compliment to the “book knowledge” gained from reading about it.

It is on Youtube in 5 parts (due to the 10 min. length limitation), but is also on Google Video in one piece (50 minutes) since they don’t have a length limitation:

This video appears to have been put together sometime in the 80s. It is well edited, and contains a lot of interesting information that you may not necessarily notice as easily in the literature surrounding the experiment.

Warning: This video contains explicit content (cursing, degrading acts, disturbing situations). Watch at your own discretion.

Download the FLV from this link. Thanks a bunch Keepvid!

In my PHIL101 class, our first reading is Plato’s “Meno”. The initial dialogue in Meno is about how to define what virtue is (or is not) – a difficult problem. An initial definition given by Meno for discussion:

Virtue: the desire of beauty and the power to attain it

Socrates, the other participant in the dialogue, brings up a good question that I’ve considered a few times before:

(S): “Does anyone wish to be miserable?”

This brings up a paradox. Some men think something that is, for the moment, considered ‘objectively’ as “bad” (e.g., would make them miserable) as something that is “good” (something that would make them happy). Essentially, some men desire things that they think will please, but in fact would cause pain.

There are then three categories of people according to Socrates/Meno:

1. Those who know what is “good”, and desire good

2. Those who don’t know what is good, but desire good

3. Those who know what is good, but desire bad (e.g., they are aware that bad things would make them miserable.)

Socrates and Meno agree that no one wishes to be miserable, and therefore the third category of men does not exist. This leaves only two categories then: those who have an accurate ability to predict what will please them, and those who are inaccurate/misguided in this ability. Meno and Socrates determine then that it is not the desire of good things that makes a man virtuous by Meno’s given definition, but rather the second condition of it: the ability to acquire good things. While discussion of this second condition leads to a further paradox of the definition itself, that is not what I wish to discuss in this post.

Adam’s Fall

As I said before, I have thought about Socrates’s question before, but in a different context – the fall of Adam/Eve in the Genesis story. It would seem at first that Eve made a bad decision with the full knowledge of its consequences when she ate the fruit of the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil”.

However, if we are to take this english phrase at face value in the context of the story, it would imply that Adam and Eve had no previous conception of what “good” and “evil” are. I think the definition of “evil” could be stretched to the implied definition in the dialogue of Meno:

bad/evil: to harm, to make miserable or unhappy

Adam and Eve in fact had no concept of how to distinguish good and evil (as defined here) – using a literal interpretation of this phrase “knowledge of good and evil”, they would fall into the second category of people – those who are misguided, or otherwise unable to make judgments for themselves of what course of action would maximize their pleasure.

From this, it would seem that Adam/Eve were given a rather unfair test of whether to follow God’s or Satan’s advice.

Consider what Eve was told by God and Satan:

God: If you eat from the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil”, you will die.

Satan: If you eat from the tree, you will not surely die. God knows that when you eat it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

Given the choice of certain death, or possible death with the gain of knowledge, what would you choose? Well, given that Eve had no way of predicting which would please more, but obviously knowledge is something she wanted for some reason, it is apparent what choice she should make. Despite Eve’s complete lack of a frontal lobe (which is our mental predictor of pain or pleasure), there is one other thing to consider in regards to the advice given. Who should Eve have trusted more? While it is easy to say “God”, since He created her, there is still a dilemma given that most likely she had no conception of what a lie is either, and therefore likely had to trust any information given to her equally.

It is then interesting to contemplate the truth of both God and Satan’s advice – did either of them really lie?

In the absolute sense, God was truthful in this storyline – if Eve ate of the tree, it would lead to a deterministic, causal chain of events where she would be kicked out of the Garden of Eden, unable to eat from the Tree of Life that can sustain eternal life, and eventually wither away.

However, I would posit that God did not reveal the *whole* truth in this matter, and that in fact Satan was more honest: The determining factor of whether Eve would eventually live or die was dependent upon eating from the Tree of Life. God kicked them out of Eden because they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but the knowledge of good and evil did not in and of itself kill Eve or Adam.

On the other hand, Satan told Eve what the direct effect of eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil would be. Also, he was correct in that given a pluralistic universe in which the future is not determined, it is possible for Eve to not die – all it would take is for God to allow Eve to stay in Eden. This is do-able, but God made the decision to kick them out. Why? Well, that’s not explained. Is there something just horribly terrible about having the knowledge of good and evil? Something corrosive? Or was it just the fact that they disobeyed God’s order not to eat from the tree? In any of these cases, it seems a rather harsh punishment for such a minor infraction.

This interpretation of Adam’s Fall does not put God in a very flattering light as a moderate and just ruler. Undoubtedly, it is an unacceptable portrayal if you are a christian. If God is just, there must be a good alternate explanation of the situation in which Adam and Eve make the decision with the full knowledge of the potential consequences of eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

But wait one second – what category would that put Adam and Eve under? Ah, yes, – category 3, those who know good from bad, but sitll desire the bad – they in fact, desire to be miserable. This comes full circle to Socrates’s original question:

(S): “Does anyone wish to be miserable?”

Well, I would say no. I honestly don’t think anyone would disagree with the assertion that people desire to be happy. Therefore, either Adam and Eve were entirely unhuman in this aspect, and did desire misery, or they were human and there was a compounding factor such as pure stupidity (another human quality that is in abundance!). In the case of stupidity, you would think God might have some mercy?!

So, really, Adam and Eve must have not known what was coming. Fundamentally then, this was an unfair test of judgment given that Adam and Eve had none. Since God was the designer of this entire situation, I would further posit that he did not directly desire us to be happy, since he put us into the very situation in which we could not have possibly made the right choice other than by shear chance (a 50/50 shot) of choosing or not choosing to eat that apple. It would seem we are rats in a maze with poisoned cheese.

I think this leaves us with a God with one of two kinds of character:

1. Apathetic – God puts two humans into a situation in which they must use nonexistent judgmental powers to decide whether or not to follow orders. Given that we make the wrong choice, we are destined for a lot of suffering.

2. Vindictive – God puts two humans into a deterministic universe in which He already knows that they will make the wrong choice, and be destined for a lot of suffering.

Neither of these gods appeal to me. What about you?

I recently read (most of) the last edition of Michael Shermer’s Book “Why People Believe Weird Things”, which has an appendix titled “Why Smart People Believe Weird Things” (emphasis mine). I skipped over most of the section on pseudohistory/holocaust denial because I didn’t find that topic to be of interest to me, though it does appear to be comprehensive. Since I’ve read quite a bit of literature on skepticism/agnosticism/science v. religion/etc., there’s a lot of this book that I could skip over. However, there is still a considerable amount of information that was new to me, was insightful, and thought-provoking. I enjoyed his appendix on smart people the most.

I had some thoughts regarding some of this section that have affected some of my own thoughs in the “quest for truth” as it were, but before I talk about it I have to give some context. So first, a few choice quotes from the book:

Shermer has a nice tag line summary of his theory on how/why smart people can go wrong:

“Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.”
- pg.283

He goes on to explain more things regarding several studies/surveys that deal with our idea of what makes a smart person smart (various measures), problems with relating demographic factors to various forms/types of weird belief, and then restates this thesis with a few more explicit factors of how everyone can go wrong:

“There is a wealth of scientific evidence in support of this thesis, but none more so than two extremely powerful cognitive biases that make it difficult for any of us to objectively evaluate a claim. These biases, in fact, are especially well manipulated by smart people: the Intellectual Attribution Bias and the Confirmation Bias.”
pg. 297

 

Intellectual Attribution Bias: “…we consider our own actions as being rationally motived, whereas we see those of others as more emotionally driven. Our commitment to a belief is attributed to a rational decision and intellectual choice (“I’m against gun control because statistics show that crime decreases when gun ownership increases”); whereas the other person’s belief is attributed to need and emotion (“He’s for gun control because he’s a bleeding-heart-liberal who needs to identify with the victim”).”
pg. 298

 

Confirmation Bias: “…the tendency to seek or interpret evidence favorable to already existing beliefs, and to ignore or reinterpret evidence unfavorable to already existing beliefs.”
pg. 299

I also liked this paragraph:

“Smart people, because they are more intelligent and better educated, are better able to give intellectual reasons justifying their beliefs that they arrived at for nonintellectual reasons. Yet smart people, like everyone else, recognize that emotional needs and being raised to believe something are how most of us most of the time come to our beliefs. The intellectual attribution bias then kicks in, especially in smart people, to justify those beliefs, no matter how weird they may be.”
pg. ??? – I returned the book to the library before I noted the page here… probably somewhere near 300 though.

I think this quote is especially poignant – smart people realize that most people decide/pursue belief of something because of emotional motivations, and not by a process of rational thought that is free of any biased default position. Somehow, though, they forget this when considering their own beliefs (intellectual attribution bias). It prompted me to think about my approach to one of the big questions: does a god exist, and if god exists, what is god’s character?

This prompted me to ask myself “What is my motivation for questioning the existence of god?”, or more specifically, “Do I question god’s existence in order to justify an emotional dislike for how the god paradigm works?”. During my teenage years I have come to realize there are many more ways of viewing the world than the judeo-christian framework put before me. This led to a deep-seated feeling of dissatisfaction with how the christian paradigm answers some of the big questions – why humans are here, what it is to have a meaningful life, what morality is. Ultimately, it comes down to this *feeling* that those answers are really overly simple, and such simplicity without explanatory power or elegance is not appealing to me. Science / rationalism may also be comparatively simple at times, but provides that explanatory elegance that I appreciate. However, feelings are… well, generally not a “good” way of guiding a quest for knowledge/truth.

When it comes down to admitting the feelings at the bottom of this endless thought process in my head, it makes me feel a bit weak at the knees. Why isn’t the christian story satisfying for me? While it does seem a bit too simplistic to be a satisfying explanation of what is probably reality (the Bible does read like a fariy tale at times), there is that nagging question: What if the answer really is that simple?

Is that so illogical? Improbable? There’s really nothing wrong with the answer of theism itself. Though it creates problems of how to shape theories of genesis (creation of the universe and mankind) in a scientific framework, there isn’t anything that is inherently wrong with the storyline itself. Even if we are to accept theism is the answer though, ultimately we are left with other nagging questions of why god did things the way he did that can significantly alter our perception of god’s character. There are plenty of questions out there that I think can shape a theoretical god’s character in very specific ways, and I consider these investigations generally more interesting than christian theology by itself.

System Problem

Yesterday night the sound card for my Tecra M7 mysteriously stopped working. I am not sure what happened. My initial guess is that it was a software/driver problem, since I could still change the volume with the button/slider on the front, yet the usual display of the volume going up/down did not display in the center of the screen.

I tried several things, including flashing the BIOS (it wouldn’t do this since it’s up to date), and re-installing the drivers (which failed, since they are installed and for some reason the processes that needed to be re-installed were being used or something, and therefore the files couldn’t be overwritten). I was just about at my wit’s end, and contemplating re-installing the OS since I *really* need the sound to work for recording classes w/ the built in mic.

Then I thought, “Why not use System Restore?”. And lo, there was a restore point from yesterday. And I chose it, and it worked. Mind you, it did not work off the bat after the restore – but the volume display slider would come up when I changed the volume. So whatever had gone wrong with the drivers was solved. But the sound didn’t work still. However, I started playing an audio file nonetheless, then muted and unmuted the sound, and it worked! The sound was back! Music to my ears!

I did a few quick searches on this mysterious sound disappearance issue while I was trying to fix it, and found a brief paragraph somewhere that mentioned the internal amp is actually turned off by the mute/unmute switch when you mute it in XP, and that in Vista it actually just goes to zero volume instead. I think what happened with the M7 is that the internal amp was muted at some point by me, and then the drivers screwed up for some reason… which isn’t surprising since I’m experimenting with software and drivers all the time.

Resolution

So, lesson learned: If your sound disappears for an unknown reason and the drivers appear to malfunction, do a system restore and mute-unmute the computer.

After a few days of trial and error with various installs, I have finally gotten it to work correctly and install the files that give the tablet pen functionality. Since school is next Monday and I have a lot of things to do to prepare for next semester’s classes, I won’t be able to get down much documenation of what I did for a while. If you’re interested in re-installing the Windows XP Tablet Edition 2005 OS of your Tecra M7, check back in a week or two. I hope to have the documentation up before then, but I make no promises.

I have to say that there is quite an improvement after re-installing the OS – my machine can do a full-boot to the desktop (auto-logon enabled) in under a minute, usually around 30-40 seconds. This is a vast improvement compared to the 5+ minutes for a factory fresh install, or the 3+ minutes after I tweaked it some. It also runs considerably smoother once it is booted up – 42 processses running at the moment, and I’m sure there were probably 70+ from a factory OEM install. If you know your way around Windows XP and aren’t afraid of tweaking your OS, then I definitely recommend that you re-install the OS as I did.

Just as a pointer to resources that I used as reference material:

• Reinstalling Windows XP Tablet Edition at Tangled Up in Purple
• Lenovo: How to: Clean Install of Windows XP Tablet Edition at Gottabemobile

There are a lot of links that jump off from these articles, and there isn’t any clear one way to resolve a lot of the problems with installing on a Toshiba machine, but if you’re willing to spend the time to figure it out, it’s worth it. I hope to provide a more coherent, simplified guide once I have the time.

[update 2007-03-12]

If you haven’t noticed already, at the top of this page is about “Installing WinXP TE: 2005 on the M7″. This the official page I’ve put together for documentation of this process, so there won’t be any more blog posts about this particular topic other than maybe brief mentions of changes or updates to the page itself. At the time of this update, it is still in a very basic stage – just a verbatim copy of an e-mail I sent to someone who asked for help with re-installing XP on their tablet. It can be improved, and hopefully will be at some point. I hope that it can be of some help in the form it is right now. Feel free to send questions or comments to my e-mail (anonym2.71828@gmail.com).

[/update]

Today, I loaded up Ubuntu Dapper Drake with a LiveCD on my Tecra M7, connected the external HDD, and deleted the 40GB Linux partition in order that I regain this for backup purposes of the M7’s data. I then resized NTFS (windows) partition to the full 160 GB afterwards in the LiveCD Ubuntu environment.

When I restarted to Windows, however, it treated the external HDD rather oddly. I did a My Computer right click > Manage > Disk Managment in order to see how it viewed the HDD. It said the full capacity was 120 GB (the size before I resized the NTFS partition) in the top window section, however in the graphical layout below, acknowledged a capacity of 160GB in the NTFS partition. Strange.

I figured at that point that Linux had kind’ve screwed up the partition table on the drive, so it’s better to just copy the data somewhere else, and format/repartition the whole drive. This lead me to copying external HDD -> external HDD through the M7. I needed to copy about 80GB of data, so I left it alone for about an hour. When I come back, I find that it’s only copied 6GB, or at a rate of about 1.5 MB/sec. This is pathetically slow, and not what I expected. I know that when copying this amount on my my dad’s desktop from drive to drive, it takes much less time.

So, off to research on Wikipedia about this, I find that the three main transfer speeds for USB are:

• Low Speed – 187.5 KB/sec
• Full Speed – 1.5 MB/sec
• Hi-Speed – 60 MB/sec

The article notes that most Hi-speed devices typically go 30 MB/sec in the real world. So, at this point it is apparent that my transfer from HDD to HDD was going at Full Speed rather than Hi, for some reason.

This leads me to ask the question: what’s the bottleneck? The Tecra M7 has USB 2.0 Hi-speed ports (not all USB 2.0 devices are necessarily capable of Hi-speed), and both HDDs are USB 2.0 Hi-speed as well. There is no apparent reason for why it would throttle down to Full speed. I also noticed that when connecting two external USB HDDs to my laptop or my dad’s desktop, the second one may come up as an unrecognized device. Fiddling with the cables seems to get it to work eventually. I’m not sure why this is either.

The following are my hypotheses/observations for why this operation is going slow:

• The OS is a little screwed up. Things tend to not do what they’re supposed to do in general.
• The USB device icon w/ arrows that pops up in the task bar told me that I need to do something to get them to go their full speed (though gives no clear direction as to what to do)
• I’m using stock USB drivers from the factory install of this computer’s OS.
• I probably need to update the drivers, and maybe the BIOS too.

For now, I am just using a desktop computer to copy the files at Hi-speed, since it can already do this. I’ll have to check for updates for the BIOS/USB drivers while I’m waiting for the files to copy. Toshiba actually has a half-decent support site.

Today I have had a rather mysterious problem pop up with my Tecra M7 – when I try to log on to my “david” account (the one I normally use every day) at the welcome screen, it will start loading, then freeze inexplicably – even the mouse won’t move. For whatever reason, doing a crash > restart > try logging in again works. I’m not sure why.

My guess is that this is caused by something that I did to the machine recently. I experiment with a lot of software, and I also just installed some for my new Creative MV100 1GB Muvo MP3 player (review to follow at some point). I think this is also in part due to the Tablet OS – I’ve found that it is rather clunky, slow, and inefficient compared to regular ol’ Windows XP. I think most tablet users would agree with me here – even if you get kick-ass hardware, this OS extension really bogs down the practical use of the hardware.

In any case, I still have a week of vacation left, so I still have some down-time available where it won’t matter if I have my tablet working. I think I will try re-installing a tweaked OS using nLite. This requires doing a full back-up first (of course), which means clearing some space on my external HDD. I have a 40GB partition for Ubuntu Linux which I don’t really use, so I am trying to find some way to get rid of this partition and enlarge the NTFS partition again. Unfortunately, for some reason the M7 will not boot from the partition, and I can’t seem to find any good partition software that runs in the Windows environment (I prefer not to mess with DOS programs). Man, this little login problem sure sparked a chain of things to do!

So, for the moment I will be searching for some partition software… updates will probably follow at some point…

I find I am increasingly consumed with the ‘creation v. evolution’ debate, and I thought I’d put a few thoughts down here tonight that I’ve been mulling over. I have to say outright that they are not favorable to the creationist side, but that I am not closed to the idea. As Carl Sagan is famous for saying, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I simply don’t see any of this type on the creationist side.

An Argument for Biblical Literalism

Before I get into the issue of creationism itself, I will first proffer an argument for its scriptural validity for christians. This entire debate, after all, is central to the problem of religions making claims about the physical world that it is theoretically possible to verify by empirical investigation. If the creation account is only to be taken as a myth, then the entire debate is really a moot point.

Young-earth creationism is the claim that the earth is approximately 6,000 years old, and that God created the earth and all it contains in 6 days (He purportedly rested on the 7th day.. so I wouldn’t count it as part of creation week). Fundamentalists pick this age for the earth for a good reason. In the first few books of the Old Testament, lineages following from Adam can be traced to Noah (Genesis 5), from Noah to several lines of descent (Genesis 10), and on down the line to the birth of Christ, which was around 0 BC. All of these descent lines generally provide an idea of how old each generational father was when he had a kid, and when he died. A good example of this is Genesis 5:3-8…

3 And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth:
4 And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters:
5 And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.
6 And Seth lived an hundred and five years, and begat Enos:
7 And Seth lived after he begat Enos eight hundred and seven years, and begat sons and daughters:
8 And all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years: and he died.

If you take Adam as the initial father of all humanity, and trace the overlap of all these timelines, then the recorded generations in the Bible imply that Adam was created 4,000 years before the birth of Christ.

This, I think, creates a problem for those that would take the Bible seriously in determining church and/or personal doctrine, but would treat the creation story as a myth. It begs the question, why would these lineages be written down in such a manner of fact way? Why preserve fictional family trees? If it is only a myth that is to be treated as, say, a metaphor for man’s gaining consciousness through the evolutionary process, then the creation story alone would suffice to serve this purpose. However, given that the authors of these books did write in lineages as well, I would posit that they meant the creation story to be taken seriously, given a concurrent belief that the scriptures themselves are the Word of God.

If you have some alternative explanation that can somehow make it tenable to treat the creation story as metaphor for the physical evolutionary process, then I have open ears. I can’t think of one myself. In the meantime, I think it is safe to go with the proposition that if you take the Bible seriously at all, then young earth creationism is the most tenable position.

[update 2007-01-10]

I did a bit more research into the genealogy of Christ out of pure curiosity. I made the weak assumption that someone in the SDA church of which I was raised in had done their homework. There appears to be some gross discrepancies in the generational counts from the Matthew/Mark/Luke versions of Christian genealogy. This raises the interesting question of whether someone has figured out a tenable resolution for why these discrepancies exist. If not, the SDA church definitely has some soul-searching to do since a core tenet is the faultlessness of the Bible.

While I did not get to completely go through checking all the details of these genealogies / counting up the years etc., I made some notes that will be a good starting point when I have time again to go through it. In the mean time, I would have to say that this argument for biblical literalism is shaky at best.

[update 2007-03-04]

I happened to run across an article about the Ussher Chronology on Wikipedia today while investigating some things related to the Scopes Trial. According to the article, this is the most commonly accepted (though not the only) scholarly look at the chronologies of the Bible that attempts to infer the age of the earth. This study was conducted in the 17th century. It appears to be the primary source for the idea that the earth was created on October 23, 4004 BCE (a common citation of young-earth creationists).

Personally, I would not take this date to be accurate, considering some of the methods required to infer it. Most notably, there are several places where chronologies have gaps, or different versions of the Bible that have differing genealogies that can vary the timeline by as much as 1500 years. There is a definite upper limit to the age of the earth, as can be inferred from these accounts, which is perhaps why I’ve heard creationists use the figure of roughly 10,000 years instead of 6,000 – just to be on the safe side, assuming that all longer accounts of a particular section of history are considered true.

In any case, it is fairly clear to me that the Bible cannot be used as an accurate historical reference for dating events, considering the wide variations in translations / versions produced over time, and the internal inconsistencies within each of those versions. I’d say that this argument can be fairly put to rest as nothing more than young-earth creationist propaganda. The Bible is not inerrant in this respect, and should not be considered a good reference point.

[/update]

So How Do Creationists Explain This..?

Rather than trying to disprove the myriad arguments for creationism, I would rather start with some interesting genetic experiments done recently. There are interesting implications for the beliefs of creationists.

This is a clip taken from a lecture given by Ken Miller at Brown University that is 4.5 minutes. I would highly recommend seeing the whole lecture, but if you don’t have the time, then at least watch the 4 minute clip. The whole lecture (117 minutes) is here:

A short rundown of this clip:

• Humans have 46 chromosomes in each cell, 23 from each parent
• All other modern hominid species (apes) have 48 chromosomes, or 24 from each parent
• If apes and humans are descended from a common ancestor (as evolutionary theory claims), then there must be an explanation for why this is. There are only a few plausible ways this could have happened, since if an entire chromosome disappeared, then we likely would have died off fairly early
• One hypothesis: the human genetic line at some point had a 2 unique chromosomes (of the set of 24) fuse into one. This leaves us with 23 chromosomes total.
• It is common knowledge in genetics that the ends of chromosomes have sequences of DNA called “telomeres”, which are essentially just location markers – they indicate the beginning/end of that chromosome’s DNA.
• If the previously mentioned hypothesis is true, then if we sequence all the chromosomes from a human, we should find one with a patch of telomeres in the middle, where two chromosomes fused.
• This is exactly what we found when we sequenced the human genome.

I think this is an absolutely gorgeous example of the predictive power of scientific theories, and of evolutionary theory in particular.

Implications, Motivations…

But what does this result of the human genome project mean to creationists? After all, God can make us any way he wants.. even if it ends up looking like evolution is a plausible alternative. Fundamentally though, why would He do this? It is clearly unnecessary to have those chromosomes fused, as it is simply a matter of the tail ends being stuck together – there is no significant coding information in telomeres by themselves that would change our biology. We can only be left to guess as to why a creator God would do this.

At the same time, this example gives good reason for why evolutionary theory is used as an explanatory/predictive model of biology in the modern day – because it works. This does not necessarily imply that evolution, and the corresponding storyline of all life descending from a few initial pieces of primitive life, is in fact the way that we came to be. On the contrary, and as I mentioned before, God can create in any fashion he wants. I just have to say that it is rather curious that he would leave such tell-tale marks of evolution.

What motivations could he have for doing this? An obvious one to an atheist is, spite and/or whimsy. Christians, however, do not take kindly to this characterization. I would ask christian readers to respond: why do you think God would create in this manner?

[update 2007-01-10]

I would like to, at this point add another beguiling feature of our universe as created by an intelligent being:

A Young Universe That Looks Old

Given the biblical literalism / creation story is accepted as assumed before, the creation week was a literal 6-day period. This implies that if all stars were created in place, we would not be able to see anything beyond the ~6,000 lightyear distance boundary. This leaves us with three options:

1. The universe was created in a manner similar to the cosmic expansion/big bang model, but much, much faster than we thought. I’m sure there’s plenty of cosmologists that cringe at the thought of this since, it probably violates a lot of the math underlying the formation of the universe – things that result from a formation that takes billions of years rather than a few minutes. The pace of formation no doubt would change many things, and I would venture a guess that the cosmic background radiation would be a bit different.

2. The universe was created in the manner as described by our best scientific understanding, with an age on the order of a few billion years. This is completely discordant with the idea of creationist theory, and is therefore a direct conflict with the creationist ideology if it is in fact how things happened.

3. The universe was created in six days, but God placed the photons emitted from stars in pathways so as to make it look like the universe was created in a manner as described by our best scientific understanding (billions of years old). This bypasses the problem of transmission time, but creates the question of why God would create the universe in such a manner as to be completely physically decieving as to how it was formed.

Again, this raises questions as to the motivations behind why the universe or the structure of life itself on this planet appears to be of ancient origin, yet was supposed to have been created in a comparatively miniscule time period. Why would god go to such lengths to “cover up” the physical consequences of a young universe? Option #1 allows for things to stay quasi-plausible and still within a scientific framework, but it still undoubtedly violates a lot of principles of physics, which again comes to the problem of why god would invoke exceptions of physics in order to make a young universe look old.

[/update]

Matthew LaClair, 16, taped his 11th-grade Advanced History class teacher David Paszkiewicz in Kearny, New Jersey. Why? Because the first week, the teacher started proselytizing to the class and advocating a christian fundamentalist position as the only way to get to heaven. LaClair didn’t think administrators would believe him if he said his teacher was saying these things, so for the next 8 weeks he taped the class.

So far, I have only been able to find a few of these recordings on the internet:

• “Talk in Class Turns to God, Setting Off Public Debate on Rights“, New York Times – see the Multimedia section. It uses streaming flash audio, so I can’t link directly to the audio. These are only choice bits of audio of when the teacher proselytizes to the class.
  • Direct Link to Flash Multimedia feature of this Article – still streaming, but not dependent on the article still being present.
• “Classroom Recordings“, The Observor Editor’s Blog. Has links to two clips of audio, both of the same day of class (early September), unedited. I will be posting copies of these clips on Ourmedia so they are sure to be archived for posterity. Links to these files to follow. Right now I am having difficulty with uploading to Ourmedia – it is giving me a mysterious error that I can’t deal with right now.
  • I’ve listened to these recordings, and there doesn’t appear to be any direct advocacy of his specific religion (he’s even diplomatic enough to make the distinction between an islamo-fascist and people who follow Islam that are nonviolent)
  • Clip 2 – 5:45 – Paszkiewicz makes a comment about how America has a superior worldview to China’s. The teacher cites the fundamental differences as freedom of speech vs. political prisoners, voluntary vs. forced abortion, no communism vs. communism, etc.. I would say that while the teacher is right in that our freedoms should be valued, I’m not sure I would frame that as a “superior worldview”, as if there is some moral framework that can judge how good various governments are. Perhaps he meant it more in the sense of the general level of satisfaction of the people governed?
  • Clip 2 – 9:00 – Paszkiewicz says something about a guaranteed war of some type happening in this region according to the Biblical timeline. It’s difficult to understand this comment if you don’t hear the surrounding context of the discussion. Nonetheless, I’m not sure what he means by the Biblical timeline.

David Paszkiewicz (left), Matthew Laclair (right).

Source for pictures is the New York Times Article.

According to the New York Times article, Paszkiewicz has had some chats with the school administration, after which there have presumably been no problems (no more complaints from LaClair, at least).

The surprising thing about this entire story, though, is that the majority of the other students and parents of students are on the ’side’ of the teacher. I think this is unfortunate, but it is at least evident that due to the vigilance of one student who spoke out, that corrective action was taken. I only worry about further classes of students who may not have the courage to do so.

Sort’ve paired with my “Summer 2005 – Welcome to Intercourse, PA” picture. Along the trip that summer, we stopped across the street from one of these stores – a Kum & Go – and I could’ve sworn I took a picture. I can’t find it right now though. They apparently have a website though! http://www.kumandgo.com/index.html

Maybe that picture’s on film somewhere. In any case, when I saw the sign for this store I just thought to myself – who came up with this name?!? Seriously…

This was taken during a road trip (summer of 2005). Intercourse, PA was given the name when the word didn’t have sexual connotations, but is now a popular tourist location b/c of the more recent connotations of the word. Wikipedia even has a snapshot of this sign in the article about the town!

Probably the only reason they don’t change the name today is b/c of all the business it generates! But seriously, if you had to tell someone “Oh, I live over in Intercourse…” would you really wanna live there?

I had all my finals (3) on Monday. So I woke up today with literally nothing to do as far as classes go. My first instinct? Go to the library! I picked up a couple of volumes from the “New Books” section:

• “Why People Die By Suicide” by Thomas Joiner
• “behind the SILENCE: Chinese Voices on Abortion” by Nie Jing-Bao

I have read 21 pages into the second book, and am simply fascinated with this author’s candor and efforts to provide a text that is to represent the wide variety of opinions and feelings regarding abortion in China. The introduction gives a few excerpts of interviews with woman who have had abortions, and doctors who perform them, and also patently discloses that the book is not intended to be a “scientific report” on this issue, but rather a text to represent the human context – views, emotions, actions – that the Chinese take in regards to this issue.

The most surprising thing that I have found in the first 20 pages of this book is that there is apparently a Western (American) meme that stereotypes the Chinese as completely heartless in regards to this issue. This meme purports that for the Chinese, abortion is not considered a moral/ethical issue, and that they consider it simply a medical procedure; that abortion is not in any way considered the extermination of a human life. The author, who is a Chinese medical student who has studied in the US as well, flatly contradicts this with the reality of her research – interviews with 60 people, and survey data collected from a wide range of people (700 participants in the study overall) – that highlights the Chinese’ paradoxical silence that Westerners perceive as apathy, and the individually diverse views on the subject.

It looks like it will be a good, enlightening read. I have already encountered many interesting ideas, and a foreshadowing of an interesting interplay between the cultural context that people live in and how they consider moral, ethical, and social/political issues. The Chinese’ view of abortion is almost completely alien to that of Americans’, and is perhaps the reason for the misunderstanding. The majority of the language we use to describe this issue does not adequately address the differences in cultural thought between East and West – it seems that there is an almost completely different emphasis on how individual rights and social welfare are prioritized.

Consumerist’s “Verizon Doesn’t Know How to Count” post today (also contains a transcript gakked from the blog below with added time stamps)

Also, the guy’s blog that he setup just for this incident (VerizonMath at blogspot)

This post contains a customer call to Verizon (youtube clip) disputing his bill of $71.79 for 35,895 KB of data transfer while he was in Canada. The main problem is that while he was quoted 0.002 cents per kilobyte, he was actually charged 0.002 dollars (or 0.2 cents) per kilobyte on his bill.

Here’s the Youtube clip:

Apparently, Verizon CSRs are completely incapable of understanding how you use algebra with conversion factors to make units cancel. The correct math for his bill would be:

1. 0.002 (cents/kilobyte) * 35,895 kilobytes = 71.79 cents
2. 100 cents = 1.00 dollar
3. => 1/100 (dollar/cent) * 71.79 cents = 0.7179 dollars

Instead of reading the calcuation in Step 1 as cents, however, the CSR assumes that the calculator *automagically* knows that the CSR wants this quantity in dollars, and that it will convert it to this format for the CSR – thus reading the bill as $71.79, instead of $0.7179 once the correct conversion from cents to dollars is calculated.

In any case, I find it completely inexcusable that these people have no understanding of how to use basic Algebra 1 math techniques for finding out how much he should be billed on the quoted rate of 0.002 cents (just replace cents with x, dollars with y, and kilobytes with z.. it’s all the same). Perhaps a 10 year old could get away with not knowing this, but 5+ CSRs that are 18+ years old?

Happened to find this hilariously funny article at Drivl via Boing Boing.

Excerpts:

“…I understand that Hollywood needs to dress things up to make them more entertaining, but in the case of programmers, code, and hackers they’ve done more than dress things up – they’ve morphed a little stuffed teddy bear into a cybernetic polar bear covered in christmas lights and phosphorescent hieroglyphics with a fog machine pumping rainbow smoke out of his ass.”

My personal favorite (the last one):

“10. Most code is not inherently cross platform
Remember in Independence Day when whatshisface-math-guy writes a virus that works on both his apple laptop AND an alien mothership? Bullshit!
If real life were like film I’d be able to port wordpress to my toaster using a cat5 cable and a bag of glitter.”

Matt sure knows how to write smart sarcasm! I love it!

Since last post, I was unable to access saved drafts that I hadn’t published due to some embedded HTML in a draft of the previous post. I went to BlogDesk’s website to check out the FAQ, which recommended checking the built-in help system (what a thought!). It turns out BlogDesk actually does have fairly thorough documentation. I found out where the drafts were saved – and fortunately, each post draft is an individual file – so I removed the offending post, and my ability to access drafts is restored. Yay! I don’t have have to re-install or lose data now!

Chalk one up to the BlogDesk team!

I’ve been reviewing quite a bit of Calc I stuff for the final on Monday, and decided I’d do a quick screencast of how to derive the equation used in Newton’s Method for approximating the root of an equation. This post is mostly an experiment in embedding a flash-export of what I recorded (in a more web-friendly 800×600 size) into a blog post. I’ve already uploaded the *.swf file to Ourmedia at this link.

Blogdesk Doesn’t Like Embedded Objects

I tried writing & uploading this post in Blogdesk, however it seemed to not like the ‘embed object’ HTML that inserted. When exporting something from the Flashback Recorder (FBR) into flash, it automagically generates an HTML file that sources the flash file it generates. Theoretically, all it would take to make this web-enabled is to change the path in EMBED src:”<path>”.

Blogdesk’s “Save post” feature isn’t working now that I have saved that post with HTML in it. I can’t open up any drafts that I haven’t posted. This seriously sucks, considering that I have no idea where it saves these, and thus would have to re-install the program in order to get rid of the corrupted/unliked saved file.

[update 2006-12-08]

See the next post – BlogDesk Help files saved the day!

[/update]

WordPress Doesn’t Let You Embed Objects in Posts

I’ve now tried embedding flash using WordPress’s online editor, however every time I save the post and look at the preview, the code disappears. A quick check of the forums/FAQ reveals that WordPress doesn’t allow <embed></embed> type html for security reasons. The only thing allowed is stuff from goo/youtube and odeo (audio), for which there is a shortened non-HTML syntax for embedding a player for audio/video of a particular file in a post.

External HTML Link w/ Embedded Object: Thank You Ourmedia!

So, now I’ll try something else: uploading an HTML file to Ourmedia that links to the uploaded file, and link to that from here. A less than ideal solution (it doesn’t directly appear in the post then), but if it works, then at least people can view my screencasts in a browser / in a streaming style player rather than downloading a file and opening it.

HTML file hosted at Ourmedia with Embedded Flash Object

The HTML file appears to work fine, so it looks like I’ll have to go through some rather cumbersome measures to put up any custom *.swf embedded files, and link to an external page. Now I know!

Here’s the Ourmedia meta-pages for the files:

HTML

SWF

I’ve seen a few videos from TED before on Google Video – namely, Ze Frank’s 20 minute presentation – however, I had no idea that in fact, TED provides high quality (mp4, mp3 compression) from each presentation on their official website.

TED is a conference that is focused on having the leading cultural and scientific thinkers of the day share ideas with the public (or, at least, the attendees of the conference). There’s a lot of big names that have given a presentation at TED – Bono, Malcolm Gladwell (author of “The Tipping Point”), Richard Dawkins, Rick Warren (“The Purpose Driven Life”), Daniel Dennet (“Breaking the Spell”), Michael Shermer (“Why People Believe Weird Things”), and many more. There’s a cornucopia of great ideas and thought here that are well presented and entertaining.

Go take a look!

“Responsible adults should always use sexual consent forms.
Directed by Jason Reitman.”

A hilarious little skit about sexual consent!

Watch it at: http://www.glumbert.com/media/consent

I couldn’t figure out how to download a copy of this or directly link to the video itself, so guess I’ll just have to be content with the streaming flash version on the original site…

Hilarious!

Yesterday on the Friendly Atheist blog, Hemant posted a question posed by Jennifer, a former atheist that is now Catholic.

“… pretend that you’re God for a minute. You created everything in the universe, including humans. You love humans, you want them to know you and your guidelines for how they should live, and you also want them to have free will.

Given these parameters, how do you go about revealing yourself and your plan to them?”

Hemant’s response questions:

• Would Christians have answers different from the biblical story?
• What would atheists answer even if it is just a hypothetical?

I thought these were interesting questions – I’ve actually considered them before, though not quite with the same original motivation from the above quote.

I think it would be fairly easy to construct alternate and more plausible story-lines for Genesis that result in a ‘happily ever after’ ending for Adam and Eve, without anyone having to die after eating some magick fruit.

However, such an alternate story – or even just plain ridiculing the first few chapters of Genesis itself – isn’t a good argument against the fact of whether the biblical story happened or not. If it really did happen, then all storylines flow from this point, and we can’t really argue with it. The only catch is, there isn’t any hard evidence that it happened. So effectively, it’s like arguing about the plausibility merits of various similar fairy tales. This gets one nowhere.

For the believer, there is no reason to question the story – it is simply a fact of life. For non-believers, however, it begs the question: Why did God do it that particular way as narrated by the Bible?

The simple answer to this is that it just doesn’t make sense.

The more complicated: There are many ‘christian-y’ answers I could come up with on the spot that seem to explain it – illumination of God’s character, or the observant intelligences of the universes need an extended example of what happens when things go wrong. The fact is though, they are simply guesses, and really don’t fit with many other events that occur later in the Bible.

The short, tongue-in-cheek examples I gave are really pretty close to answers that I get when I ask Christians questions like that. It is something that also really annoys me – when I ask a straight question, I get an answer that explains nil about God’s character. Most can be answered with the pat response, “Well, we’ll get to learn all about it in heaven when this is all over! I can’t wait to get all those questions answered too!”

Let’s circle back to the original motivation of this inquiry though: If you were God, how would you go about revealing yourself, and your plan, to humans?

When it comes down to that question, I cannot see the pure logical necessity for the specific storyline of the Bible. Can you?

For Black Fridays, I usually go to CompUSA since they usually have better deals than BestBuy and other electronics/computer stores. Since I didn’t have much to spend, I sprung for an item that would be both useful and low-priced: a bluetooth headset.

I got the Motorola HS805 (SKU# 319547 at CompUSA). Normally $50, I got it for $20 ($21.19 after tax) with a $20 eRebate in tow. After all is said and done, I’ve payed $1.20 for a headset. I especially like eRebates, since all this involves is going to erebate.compusa.com and filling out some standard personal information + receipt number, store number, time of transaction, and it’s all done. They send you a check roughly a month later after they’ve confirmed that you didn’t return the product.

Intended Use

I don’t intend to use this headset with my phone, since it isn’t bluetooth enabled. My laptop, however, is – so I can use it for wireless listening in one ear (perfect for podcasts which are mostly talking anyway), and perhaps as a mic for recording screencasts. I’ve found the integrated mic in my laptop has slightly better sound, but the headset is a lot more convenient and isolates my voice against the static better. I already have a cheap $8 wired headset with a mic that I got ages ago, so I may end up using that instead since it eliminates the static problem and is definitely better than an integrated mic.

Batteries

A nice feature of this headset is that it uses a AAA battery instead of a standard internal rechargeable Li-on. It’s a little bigger than most of the fancy $80+ headsets, but it means that I can switch out batteries when it dies, versus having to wait for it to recharge if it were an proprietary internal battery. I already have several rechargeable Li-on AAA’s anyway, so this is a definite value-add for me.

I have yet for the first battery to die – they gave me an Energizer in the package – so I can’t say much for battery life. Supposedly it will last for ~20 hours talk time and ~16 days standby.

Specs, General Opinion

There’s virtually no formal specs/detailed information on this model anywhere on the web as far as I can tell. The most detail I’ve found is at CompUSA’s profile of the product:

• Compatibility with Bluetooth 1.2 and 1.1 enabled mobile handsets and PCs
• Includes the latest Bluetooth 1.2 standard for better call quality, less interference and faster connections
• Superior competitive talk and standby times against other basic headsets: Up to 22 hours of talk time and 16 days of standby time.
• Removable earhook for placement on either ear
• Unidirectional microphone to pick up the user’s voice clearly
• Green LED light to provide a visual cue of headset status
• Multi-function button for placing, receiving or ending a call with ease
• In-demand features including voice dialing, call hold and 3-way calling
• Compatible with any Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone including the Motorola A845, V600 and V710 phones.

As far as playback audio quality goes, it’s roughly equivalent to radio. Headphones are typically enabled with a profile that uses compressed mp3 streaming – headsets use a codec that emphasizes voice, so this headset doesn’t play music well. It’s just fine for listening to my podcasts wirelessly while I walk about the house!

Audio quality is prettty good when you’re right next to the transmitting device (typing away at a blog post, for example..), though static does start to add up when I walk around the house. Audio is still intelligible at a distance w/ walls between transmitter and the headset, but quality does degrade some.

I’ll post samples of the mic recording, as compared to my $8 mic, and the integrated Tecra M7 mic at some point. I’ll have to figure out something interesting to read aloud first!

Overall, I’m very pleased with this buy – it’ll hold me over until those i202’s go down in price some! $110 is a ridiculous amount to pay for some headphones…

Sources

• Here’s the story on Boing Boing
• The original story at UCLA’s Daily Bruin
• Video footage taken by a student on their cellphone (youtube, runtime 6:53)
  • Direct download link (here’s an *.FLV player)

[Update 2006-11-21]

Boing Boing follows up with a post sourcing an LAist article. It turns out that one of the police officers who tased the UCLA student was previously fired from the Long Beach PD for having being trigger-happy with his cattle prod. Big surprise!

[Update 2006-11-18]

The Daily Bruin has published a follow-up article that describes in more detail what exactly happened on Nov. 14 at 11:30 PM. Most other articles online seem to be sourcing their information from the Bruin articles.

Ironically, a lot of the commercial news sites are taking the cell footage and putting it on their own webpage, without telling us where they got it, not to mention that several of the TV news sites have clipped the footage down to 1-2 minutes, instead of the full 6.

Isn’t this a copyright violation? Did they ask the Daily Bruin or the student for permission to re-publish that video? I’m not sure, but I would think the student wouldn’t be too worried about the video getting spread about, since this needs as much press as possible.

[/update]

From the “Breaking News” Daily Bruin article referenced at top:

“At around 11:30 p.m., CSOs asked a male student using a computer in the back of the room to leave when he was unable to produce a BruinCard during a random check. The student did not exit the building immediately.

The CSOs left, returning minutes later, and police officers arrived to escort the student out. By this time the student had begun to walk toward the door with his backpack when an officer approached him and grabbed his arm, at which point the student told the officer to let him go. A second officer then approached the student as well.

The student began to yell “get off me,” repeating himself several times.

It was at this point that the officers shot the student with a Taser for the first time, causing him to fall to the floor and cry out in pain. The student also told the officers he had a medical condition.

UCPD officers confirmed that the man involved in the incident was a student, but did not give a name or any additional information about his identity.

Video shot from a student’s camera phone captured the student yelling, “Here’s your Patriot Act, here’s your fucking abuse of power,” while he struggled with the officers.”

The cellphone footage of this is some of the most chilling I have ever seen. It never actually seems to get a direct shot of the student being detained, but from side angles, and you can hear him crying out in pain several times when he gets tasered.

iLuv has just released some new bluetooth headphones – the “iLuv i202 Stereo Ear Clips with Bluetooth Wireless Technology”. See iLuv’s official product page.

The special thing about this headset/headphones model is that the ear-clips (purportedly) operate independently from each other, with no wires connecting them (Engadget, Yahoo!, Digital Trends all concur on this point). I’m not so sure, since there’s those mysterious black lines leading away from each clip. Why is that? I don’t know. I’ll have to e-mail iLuv customer service to get the skinny on that.

[update 2006-11-19]

The price of the i202’s have mystically gone up from an original price of $90 to $110. Bigger-than-hoped-for demand? Perhaps.

[update 2006-11-11]

I have e-mailed iLuv customer service and directly asked if the ear clips have any wires connecting them. I haven’t gotten a response yet. Just have to wait and see..

[/update]

The i202’s are exactly what I’ve been looking for in a bluetooth audio device:

• no wires (supposedly) between the individual ear clips
• has a mic
• has a decent amount of estimated playback time / talk time
• elegant design (kind’ve subjective.. but I think they look a lot better than Bluetake’s i-PHONO headphones)

Basic specs from the product page:

• Cost – $90 $110
• Compliant with Bluetooth v1.2
• Profiles – HSP (?), HFP (?), A2DP (streaming stereo mp3 quality audio), AVCRP (remote control of audio playback)
• Standby time – 200 hrs
• Continuous Listening time – 14 hours @ max volume
• Continuous Talking time – 13 hours @ max volume
• Integrated microphone

What’s in the Box?

• Wireless stereo ear-clip headset
• Wireless audio transmitter (mini-jack?)
• USB Power adapter (for plugging into the wall to charge)
• USB cable (plug’em into your computer to charge)
• Instruction manual
• Warranty Card

Detailed Specs

• Speaker Driver: 30mm NdFeB speaker driver
• Frequency Response: 20Hz – 20kHz (receiving)
• SPL: ?118dBA
• Bluetooth Version: V1.2
• Bluetooth Profile: HSP, HFP, A2DP, AVRCP
• Standby Mode: < 200hrs
• Listening Mode: < 14hrs (@ max. volume)
• Talking Mode: < 13hrs (@ max. volume)
• Power Sources
  • Built-in rechargeable battery
  • USB power adapter
  • USB port on a computer
• Unit Dimension (W x H x D): Approx. 55mm x 58.5mm x 21mm (2.2″ x 2.3″ x 0.8″)
• Unit Weight: Approx. 51g (0.11 lbs)

Call it what you may: an accelerometer, sudden-motion-sensor (SMS), a data air bag, these things are increasingly common in notebooks.

The most famed device having one of these is the Macbook & Macbook Pro. There’s actually a few programs out there that can take data straight from the sensor and use it as input data for mouse/keyboard/program functions (screen rotation), besides its intended use as a way to tell if a notebook is being dropped. When an SMS senses this, the hard drive heads are parked and taken off the surface of the disk so as to prevent damage.

Here’s a few sites I found with software for the Apple SMS:

• osxbook.com’s SMS section
• Seismac, and SiesMaCalibrate from suitable.com
• Smackbook – one of the most authoritative blogposts I’ve found so far about this. Contains links to IBM software that I’m investigating right now..
• Lenovo/IBM w/ Accelerometers running Linux – perl script. Knock-based commands. Sweet!

I remember reading a blog post somewhere about a linux script for an IBM notebook as well. This script purportedly allowed you to create tap codes that could be used to do whatever you want (rotate the screen, launch a program, etc.).

The Tecra M7 has a 3d accelerometer too, which is why I’m posting about this – I’ve been looking for some software that runs in a PC Windows environment that deals with SMS/Accelerometer input data. So far I’ve come up dry. The M7 came preloaded with some software that allows you to launch a program / bring up the start menu / rotate the screen based on tilting the M7 one way or the other (left-right or forward-backward).

However, I have no interest in tilting my computer. I want tap codes! Tap codes could actually be fairly useful, and as long as you program a code that is sufficiently non-random, it won’t trigger without you purposefully doing it. In any case, I’m kind’ve disappointed I haven’t been able to find anything yet. I’m not entirely surprised though, considering that, while there is an increasing number of notebooks out there with SMS, its still a fairly small amount for there to be too many programmers out there messing with them.

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of referral links from google images for the pictures I posted of the iRex iLiad e-ink reader. I thought this curious, so I did a search for “e-ink” on google images. Sure enough, the first two images are linked to my webpage. It’s rather ironic that my images, which are stock photos from iRex, are ranked higher than the iRex itself.

In any case, I came across this picture on the google image search, which looked like an iLiad in the wild. It turns out someone (named “Yak” on the forum where the image is) bought one for 500 euro before the public release somehow.

The iLiad is currently on sale for 649 euro to the general public.

Yak mentioned that the iLiad came with a stylus, and is touch-sensitive – you can write on it. Yak doesn’t mention if it is touch-sensitive, as in “use your finger” passive digitizer, or “stylus only” active digitizer, so I nosed around on the iRex site. I found a docs page. In the User Manual v2.7 (pdf), it explicitly states this uses Wacom Pen-abled technology. Yay! This is what the Tecra M7 uses. They even incorporated a power-saving feature in the iLiad – the digitizer turns off after 3 minutes if not used. I don’t think the M7 has this feature… though I’m not sure.

As e-readers go, the iLiad is definitely the pack-leader for now.

Specs include:

• XGA (1024 x 768) resolution, vs. Sony’s VGA (800×600)
• Screen size = 122 x 163 mm (4.8 x 6.4 in.), or 8″ diagonal
• Wi-fi connectivity (connects to a special iRex site only, not web browsing currently… nuts) – only one that has this to my knowledge. Supports standard wired 10/100 LAN as well.
• Wacom Penabled – read and write!
• 128 MB Flash memory
• Accepts USB memory sticks, CF type II, MMC cards for memory expansion
• 400 Mhz Intel X-Scale processor

Yak reports that the current firmware isn’t very good at power management. The charge does have a set lifetime (~7 hours) because the Wi-fi cannot be turned off. She reports that future updates will give more power management options, and speed up page refresh.

This product still isn’t quite mature enough for me to want it, even if I had the ~ US$ 830 extra to spend on such a thing.

Features I’d like to see incorporated:

• Letter size (8.5 x 11 in.) or A4 size (210 x 297 mm) screen. Anything smaller isn’t really useful for taking notes
• Wi-fi that isn’t crippled (e.g., can browse any page you want)
• faster processor (reportedly, the 2 second lag right now is not due to the e-ink itself having a slow refresh, but because the processor has trouble with vector graphics. It’s a bit better with text though.)

[Update 2006-11-09]

The title of this post was a bit premature. I was writing it while uploading the pictures, anticipating that it wouldn’t take long for them to appear on Ourmedia. The first one did in a few hours; the other two didn’t show up at all after a full 24 hours of waiting. So, I tried uploading them again today. They appeared instantly. So, now they really do work!

[/Update]

Original post from 2006-11-08:

I’m reposting with a revision of my last entry on panoramas. I have now processed View #2, and have them on flickr and ourmedia with full res pictures.

[original post... with revision]

On Sunday I went down to the quad (a rectangular field that is surrounded by all the college buildings) and took a three sets of panorama pictures at different positions.

In full res glory:

• panorama – Down at the Campus – View #1 – Picnic Table (16.43 MB)
• panorama – Down at the Campus – View #2 – Grass, Near trees (9.54 MB)
• panorama – Down at the Campus – View #3 – Middle of the Field, near College of Business (8.01 MB)

Flickr:

View #1…

View #2

View #3…

Screen Recording – Taking Notes in Calc I Class

So, now that I’ve set up an account on Ourmedia that can host most anything that I can produce, I’ll be posting some screen recordings of me taking notes in class. They’re mostly for my personal study, but I thought it would be nice for anyone who’s interested to be able to see a tablet in action.

• 2006-11-03 5.3 – Fundamental Theorem of Calculus (25.2 MB, run time 53 minutes)
• Note: When you open this screencast, it will automatically go to full screen. To get out of full-screen mode, mouse to the top right corner and click the button to get into window-mode.

The link for this was initially broken today because Ourmedia takes a while to get everything compiled together & have the file listed publicly. According to their web page, this can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.. but now the link is working! Yay!

This is MATH170-01 (Calculus I) at Idaho State University. Notes for this class (section 5.3) don’t start until about 13:30 into the recording, since we went over yesterday’s homework from section 5.2.

This file is an *.exe for a good reason. I promise it isn’t a virus. I used BB Flashback to record my screen + audio with the crappy integrated mic. It does a good job, and uses a proprietary video codec. If I export this to a standalone .exe, it still uses this proprietary codec, and gets the smallest file size possible. If I export it to the more popular .swf format, it doubles the filesize. You also get more basic playback options with the *.exe standalone player than with an *.swf. I don’t like the idea of putting this into standard video formats (AVI / WMV), since they eliminate a lot of the user control in toggling viewing features, and you end up with a much larger file anyway.

With the standalone *.exe, the viewer gets a lot more control over the video. Features include…

• toggling auto-scroll. Auto-scroll makes the window scroll near the center of the mouse, so that if your display/window is smaller than the total size of the video, you can still see what’s going on.
• toggling highlight-mouse. This feature makes a little round circle around the mouse whenever it is clicked. I find this annoying, but if you want it on, you can turn it on.
• and much more! Download the screencast to find out

It is also much more responsive with scrubbing on the timeline. In order to toggle features through a menu, you have to go into windowed mode (unless you use hotkeys).

You can toggle auto-scroll through the keyboard by pressing Ctrl+A. I recorded in full resolution 1440×900, so the average display will need to use this feature. I’d rather not crop the video since it allows anyone to see the whole screen or some other area that was written previously in the movie while the video is playing, if they so choose. I’m all about user control!

I haven’t used Ourmedia in a while, mostly because the upload process is tedious online, and they previously didn’t have any good upload utilities. That has changed.

They now recommend using SpinXPress 2.0 Beta for uploading to Ourmedia, if you want to use a desktop client. It’s painless, lets you apply all the standard features (a copyright license, meta-data galore, taxonomic classification on the website), and just plain simple. I’ve uploaded the screencast and fixed the link, so it should now work. I’ll work on the images later.. I’ve run out of time for today, I need to get started on homework.

I’m going to cut out the original “screen recording” section in my post on Nov. 3rd, and re-posting an edited version in a new post.

Here’s a few that I decided not to use, but I would recommend for those who’s needs it may satisfy:

• Profuse Host (www.profusehost.net) provides 1GB website, 100GB monthly bandwidth. They explicitly state in their sign up requirements that the website not be primarily focused on files / software / hotlinking to another webspace, as I would like to do. So, while I can’t use it, if someone else has the urge to setup a webpage, this is definitely a good option. No standard features are limited – it supports FTP, E-mail, Mysql, PHP, JSP, etc..
• Rootsweb (www.rootsweb.com) provides unlimited webspace, but also explicitly states that they will not host sites that are primarily for personal photo albums, games, fan sites, video files, music files, file storage, etc. – your website must fit within their “mission” – geneaology from the looks of it.

I previously thought that Ourmedia (www.ourmedia.org) only supported standard media file types (video, audio, images, text). Now that I look at their FAQ, however, I have found out that they support software as well. This, to me, means that they will host .exe files – just want I need for screencasts! Otherwise, I’ll need to host some large images – such as my panoramas – which I already knew they supported, but I wanted to use one hosting service for this, and Xdrive previously seemed to be the solution.

It looks like I’ll be moving back to good ol’ Ourmedia, so check back in a day or so, and I’ll have those picture links working!

Since I previously registered an account with Ourmedia with my normal e-mail address, I’ll have to create an auxiliary Gmail account in order to register an account (they only allow one account per registered e-mail).

I just figured out that Xdrive doesn’t allow direct linking on websites to free Xdrive accounts. They don’t really state this too directly in the help files; the only place you’ll find this information out in text is in the section on “creating public folders”, where it states you have to have a subscription.

So, the links to the full res pictures of panoramas in my last post are broken at the moment. And the link to my screencast of a Calc I class. I’m working on finding some free host space that doesn’t limit me to ridiculously small file sizes, and has 1GB + of free hosting.

0moola.com looked like a good option (5GB free), but they limit you to a paltry 20MB max file size limit. This is completely unworkable since screencasts regularly go upwards of 20MB, and a few of my panorama photos near that limit. This is one of the generally hidden pitfalls of free webhosting – the bandwidth & space are advertised, but file size limit is rarely on the front page (if it were, people probably wouldn’t sign up for these things).

[edit 2006-11-08]

I have put out an updated version of this post with all 3 views, with working links to full res pictures. I’m leaving this post here for historical reference.. since it relates to some of my entries about X-drive, which didn’t work out very well as a file host for hot-linking.

[/edit]

On Sunday I went down to the quad (a rectangular field that is surrounded by all the college buildings) and took a three sets of panorama pictures at different positions. I’ve processed two at full resolution, but haven’t gotten to doing the third (View #2 – up on the hill, near trees) yet since I’m usually using my computer a lot during the day, and I would have to think to start the processing job right before bed.. which I don’t always remember to.

In full res glory: [edit - links don't work... see X-drive entries]

• panorama – Down at the Campus – View #1 – Picnic Table (16.43 MB)
• panorama – Down at the Campus – View #3 – Middle of the Field, near College of Business (8.01 MB)

Flickr:

View #1…

View #3…

Yep, I stole that catchy title from one of today’s “Wired News” top stories. That’s why it’s in quotes – I’m not plagiarizing then!

the Wired Article: Solar Powers Up, Sans Silicon (the print link.. it’s a bit easier to read than the one with sidebars & ads)

This article is a pretty good summary of what’s going on in the way of solar cells that use alternative building materials. A few quotes from researchers, and profiles on three companies that are working on different products with the same goal: solar power without using expensive semiconductor-grade silicon.

the companies featured:

• Nanosolar
• MiasolÃ
• Konarka – one that I happen to have mentioned before on here!

There’s still some significant hurdles to overcome – the most important being, the durability to last ~25-30 years, as silicon does. The article is fairly encouraging in this aspect, but as with all newer technologies.. these certainly have a ways to go.

I’m thinking I will have to create a new category at some point, because I find that people are increasingly finding my site by asking a search engine questions that my blog doesn’t answer. So, hereafter such responses to search engine queries will be under their own category. Not sure what I’ll call that category yet.

Anyway, back to business…

search term: “when did Tecra M7 come out?”

answer: Engadget is usually a good indicator of when devices are slated to come out. 2006-06-15 a post came up saying it’s coming soon. On 2006-06-27 an observant commenter says, in a post about Toshiba’s newly released U205 and the Satellite R25, that the Tecra M7 has been added to Toshibadirect’s store as well.

So, there you have it – released in June of 2006, in a two week range between 06-16 & 06-27.

I went up to the pillars today (a landmark at ISU, they are atop the second highest point in the valley) and took ~130 photos, about half and half between two different points on the hill. The first was on top of the concrete pad – the highest point – near the corner, where I have the best view of the town. The second is a little bit farther down the hill, where rocks aren’t blocking the view of the Student Union Building (SUB).

I posted them on flickr, however since I have a free account they sized them down so that they are at a more “web-friendly” resolution. I’ve uploaded the full resolution photos to my wordpress account, since they apparently allow for file uploading. I don’t know how much space they allot me, or what the file size limit is, but I can at least up the full res photos on here for you to see.

• panoramic view #1 – concrete pad (1.70 MB)
• panoramic view #2 – a little further down the hill (3.39 MB)

Here’s the low-res flickr photos:

view #1

view #2

Xdrive Sign-up/Use Woes + A little Praise

I looked for some free file hosting today, and quickly found a few good services. Xdrive was the easiest to use in my situation, though I do have some complaints about what they require in order to upload a file.

I had to sign up for an AOL e-mail account in order to sign up for an Xdrive account (I guess they’re partners.. I haven’t really looked into what their relationship is exactly), and their web upload utility is unstable in Firefox 2.0. I had to use icky Internet Explorer instead. This worked fairly smoothly, but I don’t like the fact that I had to use a web browser to upload, or that it had to be, of all things, IE.

I tried to install their “Desktop Xdrive” software, however during the install process it got stuck on installing some “loopback” device in my system. The progress bar kept moving even though it stayed at 40%, and I left it alone over lunch to see if it would finish. No luck. So, for now I’ll have to give up on their upload software. I would much prefer to have such software to upload things versus using a web browser.

The Xdrive account is fairly nice beyond these quibbles. They will give you 5GB free – indefinitely (no trial period), and as far as I can tell, with unlimited bandwidth. You can make files public or private, and can directly link to them on websites/blogs.

[update 2006-11-07]

While X-drive does advertise that you can make files public / directly hotlink to them on the front page, I found out that this is not true for the free accounts. I initially tested the link of a screencast I put in this post previously, however I was still logged in with X-drive, so it let me see my own link. I’ve found now that when I’m logged out, it doesn’t let me get a look at the file, which means that you can’t see the file either. I found in their help files under “creating public folders”, it says that you must have a subscription to share your files with the world. Yuck. This is deceptive.

If this is the only post you’re looking at because it was linked to in a search engine, note that I am now using www.ourmedia.org to host my files, since they are all my original creations. Ourmedia rocks!

[/update]

Someone happened to find my blog by searching for the terms “where do you put the tecra reserve pen”. Here’s my response!

Hope that helps!

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, I found it a few weeks ago..

This is a debate I found via the Friendly Atheist blog (by Hemant Mehta, who ’sold his soul on eBay’), which linked to a Myspace blog entry, which copied from a forum debate at ravingatheist.com (the blog entry didn’t provide a source, only mentioned that it was from a forum. I had to ask the myspace kid where he got it. Part of the reason for the delay on posting this..)

Anyway, here is the link to the original forum debate. I have also archived a PDF print of the page just in case of link rot. If at some point the link does break, notify me and I will put up the PDF.

I found this debate interesting because:

1. The atheist (schemanista) actually stated a fairly tenable position in his opening remarks. He was not a “raving” atheist, in the sense of one who flatly denies God (which is as dogmatic as stating existence, since there is no direct proof), but rather states his doubt in belief b/c of a lack of direct evidence, and a general improbability.

2. The theist (Tino_Huggins) stated in his opening remarks that he was “forced to analyze [his] stance on metaphysical naturalism” after reading schmanista’s remarks. This is very rare – a discussion in which someone actually thoughtfully remarks on the other’s position, and doesn’t just pull out the debate guns and start firing as these debates typically turn out on the web.. similar to flame-wars, they are generally just pissing matches that get confused in vague statistics and sources that supposedly support one side or the other.

An excerpt from schemanista’s opening statement:

“I subscribe to metaphysical naturalism. That is, I start with the ad hoc assumption that the most probable explanation for everything we see around us is that “this” is all there is. You may need to think of that position in terms of belief, and I’m not sure that I could completely disabuse you of that notion but I think of it as an ontological position and not a belief. My main reason for doing so is that we don’t need to a priori exclude the supernatural–we’re justified in a forteriori ruling its existence as improbable because thousands of years of investigation, involving millions of person-hours of observation, cataloguing and analysis has yet to yield any proof, even strongly suggestive, that there is a supernatural substrate over which our world is cast like a veil.

Some wit on Pharyngula said (approx.): “Reality is what’s still there when you stop believing in it.” If the only people who can find evidence of the supernatural are those who are predisposed to believe in it, that suggests to me that something else is going on. I therefore reject any supernatural explanations because none have ever withstood serious scrutiny. When any doubt exists, I’ll prefer a naturalistic explanation, no matter how improbable, because it’s a better bet than trying to account for the discontinuity which a truly supernatural event would cause in our collective explanations of the observable universe.”

Enjoy!

I figured since there aren’t too many high resolution pictures of Tecra M7’s in “the wild”, I’d put a few from the stop motion vid on here. Here’s one of the photos:

And here’s a slideshow of the set…

It seems wordpress doesn’t like 4MB .gif files, so I can’t put a .gif in this post very easily. I figured youtube would be the easier route, and it was. I signed up for an account and uploaded an AVI version in less than 5 minutes. Here it is:

I would have preferred to use a .gif since they will autoloop, which makes the animation a lot cooler since it’s in continuous motion. Is there a way to set a Youtube video to auto loop? Tell me if you know..

I happened to notice that someone found my blog yesterday by searching on google for “is the presario m2000 bluetooth capable”. I’ve mentioned my previous laptop’s model before, as well as bluetooth in a separate post (nothing to do with the compaq). Since I happen to know the answer, and it’s difficult to find online or through HP, I will state it right here for the sake of consumer knowledge:

The Compaq Presario M2000 is not capable of having any internal antennas for the purposes of an internal Wi-fi or Bluetooth card. Some laptop models may come with the internal antenna, and depending upon whether you order it, the internal Wi-fi card as well. They sometimes put in that antenna even if you don’t order the card. I had this hope for the M2000, however my hopes were sadly crushed. It does not come with an internal antenna, and it would be exceedingly difficult to install one yourself. Those who are ambitious are welcome to try, but I’d suggest just buying a newer bargain-bin laptop, since it seems every single laptop over $450 comes with internal Wi-fi these days. To my knowledge, bluetooth uses the same antenna as the Wi-fi, so it is simply a matter of getting a combo mini-PCI card that does Wi-fi and Bluetooth (assuming you want both at once) if you already have the antenna inside your laptop.

If you want bluetooth on the Presario M2000, you’ll have to resort to a Bluetooth PCMCIA card (do these exist? I’ve never seen one) or USB dongle. These will never get the same range as an internal antenna, and taking up the PC slot / a USB port on the M2000 is a big deal since it only has 2 USB ports and 1 PC slot. So, el-cheapo laptop buyers beware: you won’t get much wireless capability with this Presario model.

After a few weeks of using OneNote 2003, I’m thoroughly fed-up with having a small space to actually write notes in, since it is so incredibly heavy on GUI that can’t be hidden away. Yes, ON ‘07 will have a minimal UI mode, but ON in general carries a certain clunkiness to it. The majority of the notes I take in ‘03 are either text or ink drawings (I don’t like it trying to recognize the ink as handwriting, since it then tries to put it in a textbox that makes it more difficult to manipulate). Despite having quite a bit of hardware under the hood, there is noticeable lag in switching between note-pages – I would guess because ON is a memory-hog and has a lot of stuff pre-loaded due to it’s “index everything, database searchability” attitude. Until I’ve got the dough for a 1GB stick, which conceivably could improve, but will not fix this problem, I would just have to live with a slow note program that doesn’t do its job well on a very basic level. I spent a lot of money on this machine – so this is completely unacceptable.

On a sidenote, ON still has a lot of features I like – especially the Note-flags feature, which allows you to customize them for to-do/check lists, and vocab definitions, etc. Ultimately though, this is just eye-candy/cherry-on-the-top of what should already be a competent note-taking program. Which ON is not. So I’m switching to something else.

Yesterday, I was poking through my start-menu (as I do once in a while, to maintain order & cleanliness..), and on a whim opened up Windows Journal. I’m in love. It is simple. It has a minimual UI that allows me to use most of the screen for note-taking. And – best of all – it allows me to customize the page size, and works primarily on a page-by-page note-taking paradigm. It isn’t just the continuous scrolling of ON pages. I found the default template to be unacceptable, so I made my own (blank, 7.47 x 11″ with Note title at the top). The M7’s screen is 7.47 x 12″, so this leaves an inch for UI bars at the top and bottom (start bar, drawing tools, etc.), and the full width of a portrait screen for note taking. Yay!

I may be switching to landscape in the future, since it seems that I can get a lot more information crammed in when I use landscape mode and zoom to “Page width”. This sacrifices some ability to see what’s on the rest of the page for reference purposes, but ultimately I’d rather use that page real-estate as efficiently as possible, so when it’s printed out for archival/sharing purposes, I don’t use as much paper.

Windows Journal does have note flags, but they aren’t quite as nice. And it doesn’t have the ability to compile a list from several note files all at once. Oh well. It’s something I can live without. I’ll probably just save each chapter of chem notes in an individual file in order to keep all the vocab for that chapter in one place.

So, I think I’ll be switching to Windows Journal for now. I took notes in it this morning in CHEM111 in portrait mode.. this resulted in several pages of large hand-writing, and a 123kB .jnt file (just text/drawing, no images copied in). I’m definitely switching to landscape note-taking in the future. I tried screen recording my note-taking + audio with BB Flashback, but unfortunately since I changed to portrait mode after starting the recording, it recorded a blank screen once in portrait mode. Changing screen settings in the middle of recording is an unusual circumstance for any screen-recording program, so I don’t fault them for not supporting this. I’ll just have to be more careful about what I do with the screen. Regardless though, I probably won’t have to worry about it if I take notes in landscape mode instead of switching to portrait. At some point I plan to post some examples of my notes on here, though I’ll have to find some web space to host these unusual extensions first, since most free hosting services only support typical media formats (movie/audio/pictures), and my notes would be in *.jnt, and screen recordings in *.swf (roughly doubles the size of the original file though) or *.exe (integrated player w/ BB codec.. results in the smallest file size).

Happened to find this neat Clustr Map thing while browsing someone else’s site that has it. Thought I’d get my own!

Thought I’d share this neat photo with you guys:

this is photo that was generated by autostitch, using ~130 photos that I took in quick succession while standing in the center of my room with a little 3MP camera. Autostitch is primarily meant for panoramas, whereas this is really a 360 shot, hence the slightly weird looking, but cool turnout!

I’m sure there is an automated way to insert a flickr photo and make it a link all at once, but I haven’t figured it out yet. So I did it manually – insert image by static link, make it a link to the original flickr page.. I’ll have to figure out how to streamline this process of photo-posting. I don’t want to have to post photos by using the flickr blogging feature – I really hate using web-based WYSIWYGs.

This is also marks the day that I added my glork2718 flickr stream to the side of the page, which shows the 3+ latest images from that.

It appears that the shut-down issue is more a matter of patience. I tried hitting start > shut-down option for brining up an options dialog, and it gave the usual freeze – but brought up the dialog after a few minutes. I’m not sure how long it took, since I decided to just leave it and go do a few other things, to see if it was just a matter of waiting. Previous shut-down experiences would seem to confirm this – the OS is just plain slow with bringning up this dialog for some reason.

I don’t usually have this problem after a fresh boot, however, so it may be a symptom relating to how long the computer has been running, or how many times it has been hibernate-resumed. I’m not sure which. Needless to say, the lesson here is patience, if I want to avoid having to crash my system (which I’ve only done a couple times, by the way – usually I got it to shut down properly by successive hibernate-resumes.. but apparently it really is more time-related than anything..).

I hope to get this issue resolved soon. I’m betting once all the OS processes have been individually scrutinized, I’ll have a much smoother shut-down process.

[Update 2006-11-21]

I’ve read a few articles in other places that seem to think that the Windows Tablet OS is just plain slow. I removed some OEM junk software, such as Toshiba’s power saver utility (I can manage that on my own, thank you), and I keep tabs on what starts up on boot. Still, shut-downs are fairly slow, and start-ups aren’t particularly fast. It isn’t quite as bad / tempermental as it was initially, but it still isn’t that fast. I’m fairly convinced this is a Win Tablet OS issue, and has nothing to do with the hardware

I’ve pretty much eliminated all the junk processes that I can, so I think I might just have to live with the slow shut-down/start-ups. I use hibernate most of the time anyway, so this isn’t much of a big deal.

[/update]

[update 2006-12-04]

This particular post talks mostly about OneNote, however if you would like a little more in depth review of the Tecra M7 convertible tablet model, I recommend going to the Tecra M7 page on this blog.

[/update]

Ok, so I’ve had my M7 now for a week and a half, and I love using it! There’s a few things I’d like to just write down before I forget them, since they seem to be piling up, and I need ot save that precious memory for study anyway. Here goes:

1. OneNote 2003 kinda sux . I like it a lot, but there are a few features that are not present in this program that are absolutely inexcusable. Fortunately, the majority of the ones I mention here will be in OneNote 2007 according to this MS developer’s blog.

Missing features that will be in ‘07, unless otherwise mentioned:

• drawing tools – no way to create a basic box or circle. Also means that there is no support for rotating images in OneNote – such as when you try to import a PDF that only prints to OneNote in portrait if you don’t want it to look stretched, but you need it in landscape.. Ugh.. – I had this problem with a periodic table template that I wanted to load in it..
• full screen / minimal UI mode – OneNote ‘03 does have a minimal UI mode, but you only get the benefit of this when the window is <300 px wide.
• page break lines – there is no way to display page break lines on a page. This is a big bummer if you want to print out notes that have lots of drawings in them, and they are likely to get cut in half right at the page break. The only way to fix this is to go to print preview and find where drawings are cut, then go back to the page and add page space, then check print preview.. then add page space.. a trial and error process that’s pretty tedious if you have a long document. As far as I know, a page-break type of feature to aid in making your notes more printer-friendly will not be in ‘07.
• infinite subpage structure – OneNote breaks things down in a limited hierarchical manner of “My Notebook” > Any amount of folders you want > Section > Page > Subpage. You can’t break it down any farther than the subpage. A free program called Keynote, which only supports rich text (it’s not intended for tablets), allows an infinite amount of branching from central nodes. Even the nodes themselves are notes in Keynote! I don’t understand the reasoning of having a limited number of sub-paging, but perhaps there’s a technical limitation of some kind in their implementation. To my knowledge this will not be in ‘07
• lasso select tool – they have this tool in the flash cards program, but for some reason not in OneNote ‘03. It allows you to select irregular shapes – very useful if, say, there’s a multi-part drawing at a page break line and the “add page space” feature can’t be used because some lines are too close too each other. Breaking apart the drawing isn’t a problem with the lasso, and is often much more difficult with the standard selection tool already present which only creates selection boxes.
• extra page space w/out asking for it – in OneNote ‘03, there’s a small button at the bottom of the vertical scroll bar for adding page space. If you immediately scroll up again w/out writing anything, it disappears again. This is REALLY annoying. I often do math problems, and need to scroll up to find an equation to copy.. then scroll back down to find that the extra page space I created is gone. OneNote ‘07 has changed this so that it will simply create page space as you scroll (or something along those lines).

–End rant–

Ok, so other than some missing features, OneNote is a fairly intuitive-to-use program once you get used to the folder/page/subpage structure (though I wish there were more to that structure, as mentioned before..). I’ve been doing math homework on it (a lot more fun than paper, because I can rearrange formulae on the page without erasing!) and taking notes in class.

2. Audio recording w/ built in mic – So far I haven’t used the audio recording feature for in-class notes because when I tried it in my quiet dorm room w/ just me talking, there was terrible static noise in the background. My voice is still quite audible, but I really can’t stand that kind’ve audio quality. I don’t have a sample file right now, but will in the future post a sample of quiet static vs. talking for you potential buyers out there who wonder about the mic quality. In any case, my recommendation is to get a good USB mic if you want quality recording, but that will run upwards of $50 in cost for most of the mics I’ve found online.

3. The screen is surprisingly resistant to scratches – I was worried that not getting a screen protector to put on it right away would be the doom of my screen. It turns out that Toshiba has designed it for its intended use though – while there are a few very small scratches now that can only be seen at very oblique angles in direct sunlight, the screen looks spotless in any other situation. I still have to clean the screen every day though from hand oils from using it in slate mode, which is not surprising.. just something to keep in mind. I’ve been using a lint-free cloth intended for cleaning glasses, and I really need to get some general lens cleaner in a spray bottle, as that stuff typically works well for any kind of display as well.

4. Battery life is shorter than advertised – big surprise! With casual mixed use of Wi-Fi on/off, I’ve been getting something like 5 hours of battery life when I have both a regular 6-cell inside (only option available) and a 6-cell slice expansion battery pack attached. This isn’t bad, compared to the typical 2 hours I got from a 6-cell in my last laptop – a Compaq with considerably less hardware (bought $550 on sale a year and a half ago). It’s certainly plenty enough for my needs, but certainly not what is advertised. See the official specs – PDF of a particular model for advert. battery life.

Of course, some of this might have to do with variations in hardware – I have an Nvidia card that draws additional power for the internal RAM, and a faster processor (T2500) than any of the specific models whose specs are listed in PDF form. Still, I don’t think that justifies a 3 or 2 hour difference in battery life.

5. It’s super-responsive compared to my last notebook. The Core Duo processor is definitely a quick puppy. There are a few delays in loading various things, however these are primarily due to the fact that I have 512 MB of RAM, and therefore the PC has to pagefile some things to the hard drive, thus slowing performance. Nonetheless, the hibernate-resume function is very quick, and programs that were sluggish on my previous laptop (1.3 Ghz AMD, 512 MB) are super-quick on this one.

6. Shutdown behaves oddly sometimes. I don’t know why, but for some reason when I go start > shutdown, the PC semi-freezes. I can still move the mouse, select icons, etc., but the start menu becomes unresponsive. If I ctrl+alt+delete and hit “shut-down”, this will freeze the screen as well and make it unresponsive.

Once, simply hibernating and resuming solved the problem – the shut down dialog came up and allowed me to select “shut down”, so that I could reboot the system into a fresh state in the morning. This hibernate-resume technique doesn’t work every time though, and I think is indicative of some odd inner-workings of the XP Tablet Edition, since it probably has to check with a few TPC processes before loading that shut down menu. I still need to investigate the list of processes that run in startup, so I can eliminate those that are unnecessary.

Anyway, I don’t like having to force-crash a brand-new computer just to get it to reboot, so I’ll have to take this up with tech support, or perhaps talk to my techy friend down the hall in the Owen dorm. Either way, I think this issue is resolvable and quite possibly something unique to my system alone – something that is not systemic to all M7 models.

—-

I guess this post turned mostly into a whine/rant about some things that I was disappointed about, but I should hope that no one considers this to be a listing of reasons why not to buy the Tecra M7. It is a great little notebook, and quirks are something to be expected with any model. Once I get some new software (ON ‘07 at some point), and work out the technical difficulties with shutting down, my system will be running clean as a whistle!

Pics coming soon! My dad left a 3MP point-and-shoot, and I’ll be taking a few pictures of my M7 tomorrow

[update 2006-11-10]

• “The Synthesizer” article is now available online at SEED’s website.
• See SEED’s edited video of the interview on Google Video.
• Or, Download the interview in..
  • High Quality AVI (52 MB) – I got this one.. and it doesn’t show the video (played the audio) in VLC for some reason, and Windows Media Player won’t touch it. I don’t know why.
  • FLV (30.1 MB)
    • Download a free *.flv player
• Generate download links to all kinds of streaming video (Google, Youtube, etc.) via www.keepvid.com

[/update]

I just read an article in SEED magazine titled “The Synthesizer”, which is about a scientist named E. O. Wilson – an old chap that is trying to build bridges between evangelicals and scientists in the name of saving the environment. But that’s not all – of all fields, he is in entomology – specializing in a few hundred species of ants. In many ways he was a founder of sociobiology, and is a proponent of the idea of “consilience”, something along the lines that some day all knowledge will be explainable under one overarching paradigm of thought. He is a bridge-builder at heart, and he does this a lot – especially with branches of specific fields in science.

I write this blog entry because there was a quote of Wilson in the SEED article (currently unavailable online..) that struck me as a very concise summary of the interaction between science and religion:

“If the naturalistic view of the world including religious belief is consilient, then essentially religions would be hollowed out of their mythologies… [Religion would] remain as religion, observing rights of passage, exploring depths of spiritual feeling, but would not depend upon supernatual explanation. In that sense they [science and religion] would be compatible.”

This quote in many ways parallels some thoughts I’ve had before. It summarizes a common thought of the scientific community – science is for determining facts, and providing overarching explanations of those facts (theories); religion is primarily a social tradition and culture that is valuable for exploring an emotional depth unreachable by the rational process, but not built for telling people about the world in a factual manner (what pi is, or the structure of the solar system).

In short, science is for determining empirical truth, and religion is for exploring ‘human’ truth.

I’ve heard many times from other people that science and religion cover different domains, and are therefore compatible – they don’t directly clash. It is true – religion and science don’t clash when religions don’t make factual claims, such as how the earth or the human race came about. When they do, they have crossed the line into a field of testable hypotheses. Religion and science clash at this point. It is dangerous for a structure of thought that is fundamentally based upon faith rather than empirical evidence, to make factual claims. Religions generally rely on the fact that any hypotheses related to testing their basic tenants are not feasible in this day and age, and thus there is no evidence either way (proved/disproved) in order to ’stay in business’ as a religion. Religions are often something that is imaginable, but not provable.

E. O. Wilson’s quote summarizes what I think is the hope of many secularists, atheists, agnostics, skeptics, (etc.) – that religion can still play an important role in society, but not the one that fundamentalists wish it to play. However, this more enlightened role of religion in society depends on unilateral acceptance of naturalism/empiricism/rationalism in general. While most will accept such things at face value, when they come to clash with cherished empirical claims of ancient religions that are interpreted in literal ways (fundamentalism), people lash out. In the U.S., this consilience of religion and science will depend on the progressive sects of christianity abandoning many of the levitical edicts, and a non-literal interpretation of the Bible as a whole. While this would end many culture-wars, it does beg a few questions:

• What does the Bible matter if it isn’t literal?
• Isn’t it really just a (gory) fairy-tale book then, with a few hypocritical morals to the story? Does the Bible become an ‘Adult’s Aesop’?
• How does a non-literal interpretation of the Bible affect the Christian’s view of the Heaven/Hell universe-drama?
  • Do they no longer believe there really is a god out there?
  • that there is an afterlife?
  • that (some of) the morals in the Bible are a good general guide, but not really binding in a reward/punishment system of judgment?

It raises many other issues that have more to do with the culture-wars within american christianity itself rather than the science-religion debate. A whole ‘nother can of worms. I was personally raised in an SDA home, and find it hard to consider treating the Bible in any other way than literal if it is to be accepted at all as a truth or guide to a way of life. I have no interest in discussing the particular doctrines of one sect over another, but I do wish I had someone to talk to about the differences between literalist and progressive (non-literal) interpretations of the Bible. I’ve not had much exposure to that way of thought, and consider it an intriguing.

Yay! My new notebook has arrived. I picked it up around 11:30 today, went to lunch, then came back and carefully unpacked it and inspected everything. It’s beautiful!

So far, I have done the basic Windows setup (adding a few user names, naming the computer for the network, comp. description), and logged on. Wow! There’s a lot of pre-installed junk on this machine, and the first start-up even had a couple of script errors occur in self-launched internet explorer windows. It appears Toshiba also has a deal with McAffee Antivirus (*yuck*), as it prompted me to make this my main “security center”. I prefer free AVG, so I declined that option.

The OS also keeps prompting me to disable the standard CD-R/RW option so that I can burn DVD-RAM (apparently these can’t be enabled at the same time). I declined each time it popped up, and it seems to keep want to bothering me even when I say “no” to disabling – I want to keep CD-R/RW enabled. I finally caved after the incessant prompts though, and just disabled. Something to fix later.

Something to note: the first time I stuck a CD in the drive, it was fairly noisy in its initial read of the disc. I hope this isn’t a consistent feature of the drive.

I haven’t done much exploring in the OS other than to install Norton Ghost 2003 and start a backup onto my external USB 160G HDD. The backup will take about 2.5 hrs (fast compression), since there’s about 7.5 gigs of data already on there. I think in the future I will be using the “no compression” option – I bet this is what prolongs the backup process so much. Initially Ghost was copying data at 120MB/s, however is at the moment going at 43MB/s. I’m not sure why it slowed down – something to investigate online I guess.

It looks like it will take a considerable amount of time to clean up this system before it’s in usable (read: tweaked, fast, no junk) condition. There is already quite a few people out there that have gone through this experience and posted guides on what to remove, but for now I think I’ll let my nose and a few system utilities guide me.

Summary of things to do:

• clean up the OS – startup junk, pre-installed software, etc.
• investigate why Ghost slows down the copy rate after a while
• remember to use “no compression” next time I do a Ghost Backup, and compare data transfer rates
• register the M7 w/ Toshiba, and the OS key w/ Microsoft
• check on the warranty to make sure it’s activated (Standard + SystemGuard)
• go down to the College of Business and get my MAC address registered so the M7 can access the EDUWIFI network (ISU’s wireless internet for the campus).

I happened to find this YouTube video today while doing my regular news reading. See also MSNBC’s text news story on this.*Shivers*

Apparently, an elderly Mr. Gerber had brought a computer in for service at BestBuy when it “crashed”. Judging from the results of the story, this was either an OS/software problem, or a hard drive that is beginning to fail but is still functional. The BestBuy techs restored his data onto the new hard drive, but would not allow him to have his old one back. They said it would be “sent to Chicago” – to the manufacturer – where they would “verify the warranty”, and then drill a hole in the HDD to prevent the data from being retrieved. They couldn’t give it back to him because it’s “under warranty”. I can understand this – manufacturers would like to verify that the customer’s drive actually failed.

However, a few months later Mr. Gerber receives a call from “Ed”, who says that he bought Mr. Gerber’s old hard drive at a flea market for $25, and would he like to have it sent back to him, or the data wiped? Mr. Gerber reports that his and a few grand children’s SSN’s on there, as well as sensitive financial records. He had it sent back to him.

Something went wrong in the chain of custody here, because the data was neither wiped nor the HDD gutted with a drill. This leaves open an interesting question: are retailers / customer service departments liable for identity theft damages if they resell a used HDD?

While it is shoddy tech support to replace a functioning HDD, I can understand the reason for the company reselling used parts. If this practice is to continue, however, then I would think it legally obligatory for them to be under liability for identity theft when they say personal data will be destroyed. Yet, I haven’t seen any big lawsuits regarding this type of incident.

The moral of the story:

1. Users should, in general, get computer parts back even if they don’t work, and *especially* if they are non-volatile storage.

2. If retailer’s don’t want to give back the parts b/c of resale value, then they should either allow the customer to supervise destruction of the data, or agree to a specific liability contract regarding identity theft, so that the customer has a clear-cut case in court regarding his/her rights & entitlements.

3. #2 is really a big hassle, so why not just go with #1?

The Tom Bihn Carrying Case – a Monolith, size 2 – has arrived on schedule. It arrived at 11:07, and I picked it up around 15:30.

The Monolith is very light (13.35 oz according to the specs page), and has sturdy construction. The inner padding is very soft, and the handle fits nicely in my hand. I had a moment of panic when I held it next to my backpack – I thought it might not fit in. I managed to get it in, however it is the full height of what the backpack can handle – so perhaps a little more bulky than just sticking the laptop in there, but definitely much more safe for the laptop. As a bonus, it already fits the my current laptop quite easily, so I’ll be testing the monolith over the next few days while I’m waiting for the M7 to get here.

 [edit 2006-11-08]

I’ve noticed that this particular post is getting a lot of traffic, however I don’t know if those who find this post are going to the more comprehensive page on this blog that includes my general experiences with the M7 and some tips/tricks that aren’t necessarily obvious (where to put that darn reserve pen!).  I’d recommend going there.. it has everything this post has & more!

[/edit]

I have spent an insane amount of $$$ on a convertible tablet notebook – the Tecra M7. My mom – who has the credit card – ordered it online w/ my configuration on 09/24/06 (Friday night).

The breakdown of my www.Toshibadirect.com order:

Laptop Config – Tecra M7

• Intel Core Duo Processor T2500 (2.00Ghz, 2MB L2 Cache, 667MHz FSB) – sweetness! I’m glad I’m getting a Core Duo, and kind’ve wish I could get a Core 2 Quadro, but I’d probably be waiting another year in order to buy that. Once those chips come out, it will probably make the Core 2 Duo tablets a lot less expensive, but then again, the main cost of these tablets isn’t the processor anyway.
• “Genuine” Windows XP Tablet Edition 2005 – for all you MS bashers out there, hold back – Tablet Edition is actually the best OS out there for tablets at the moment in all aspects of pen integration.
• 512 MB x 1, 667MHz DDR2 PC5300 SDRAM – I intend to get a 1GB stick later, as they charge an exorbitant price at Toshibadirect.com for extra RAM)
• 14.1″ Diagonal WXGA+ Display (1440 x 900) w/ High Brightness and Wide View Angle – the largest size (inch-wise) display available for any tablet on the market, and the highest resolution (pixel-wise) for any display of this size inch-wise
• NVIDIA Quadro NVS 110M w/ TurboCache and 128MB dedicated graphics memory – according to reviews / online forums, mainly a graphics workhorse for rendering or photo manipulation, not games. This is the best video card available for any convertible tablet notebook on the market as of 10/04/2006.
• 100GB HDD (5400rpm, Serial-ATA) – I didn’t opt for the 7200 rpm since most online reviews / whitepapers are saying that there is no significant performance difference between 7200 and 5400 rpm drives, and in some case higher spin drives actually did worse. Definitely need 100GB too! I’m pretty cramped w/ the 40GB notebook I have right now..
• DVD SuperMulti (+/-R double layer) drive – sweet!
• Atheros 802.11a/b/g wireless-LAN – because there seems to be waffling on which is better (Atheros or Intel), and I wanted to be different
• Bluetooth (v2.0) + EDR – because I want to pay an exorbitant mark-up for wireless devices that can communicate with an internal transceiver, rather than requiring individual transcievers plugged into all my USB ports.

Warranty, Accessories

• Toshiba Tablet PC Reserve Pen – fits into a little nook in a compartment that is easily opened, in case I lose the original full-size one..
• 3 Year Standard Limited Warranty – actually pretty decent. Covers wear & tear, and any shipping costs back and forth.
• 3 Year SystemGuard + ServiceExpress – covers any accidental damage (dropping it down a staircase, or maliciously running it over with a dump truck). ServiceExpress just makes *my* tablet a priority – guaranteed deadlines for service.
• Toshiba Slice Expansion 6-cell Li-On Battery Pack – because combined with the original 6 cell that’s supposed to give 4 hours, this theoretically gives a battery life of 8 hours! And it doesn’t requires a $250 separate charger to charge, since I can charge it along with the regular one while it is attached to the tablet. Yes, it costs $80 more than another regular internal battery, but that’s a lot less than an extra $250..
• Toshiba Keyboard Protector for Satellite, Tecra, and Qosmio – b/c, after all, who wants a dirty keyboard after 3 years of use? Protect your investment, especially if it costs upwards of $2k!

Carry Case

I’m also ordering a Size 2 Monolith (black) carrying case from www.TomBihn.com. Their products appear to be of high quality (plastic outer shell, inner padding design), and fairly priced ($45 for the Monolith). They also have a guarantee that allows for returning the product if it doesn’t fit, or has a defect for a full refund minus shipping cost ($7 to get to my dorm room.. I don’t know how much back).

The Monolith is designed to be carried in a vertical fashion, and can be put in another bag (for me, my current backpack) that carries other stuff. I was concerned that if I had a the Slice Expansion battery attached, it would make the M7 too big to fit into one of their standard sizes (it adds 0.9″ at the thickest point, for a total thickness of 2.47″ on the M7). Their thickest case – size 2 – is only 2.25″, however I was assured by a CSR in an e-mail exchange that it would still fit since this is a fairly small margin of difference, and the internal padding can compress some. We’ll see!

Order Status, Shipping

According to Toshibadirect.com’s order status page, my tablet will ship on 10/10/06. They shipped the accessories (Slice Expansion battery, Keyboard protector) on 09/27/06, which later arrived on 10/02/06 (I picked’em up on 10/03/06 down at ISU’s post office). Everything in that package was in order. The manual for my battery had cute, juvenile cartoons to accompany each bullet-point of do’s and don’ts (like making sure it’s between 5 and 35 degrees C before using it..).

I just received an e-mail today (10/04/06) that Tom Bihn has billed / shipped the carry case. It is slated to get here on 10/06/06.

Bought on Sale!

My mom made the order on Friday night, 09/24/06 – the last day of a short promotional ToshibaDirect was having where they would pay for the tax on Satellite, Qosmio, and Tecra models (~$100 for my M7 config).

They also have a long-running promotion that pays for your shipping, but this cost was negligible anyway (~$10).

This is probably the best sale I would’ve gotten for the Tecra M7 in the latter months of ‘06 – Labor Day passed without any sales on the M7. I don’t expect much for the Black Friday / Thanksgiving / Christmas season since it is a top-of-the-line model that they usually don’t offer discounts on – especially since I got a custom-config model, rather than a pre-config that can be sold in stores.

To Be Continued…

I’ll be posting more information once the tablet finally get shipped here. I don’t have a digital camera, but might be able to borrow one from someone in the dorm for a little while in order to take some “opening the box” / “first time use” pics.

I’ve been considering learning Esperanto. Well, really my goal is to learn an IAL (international auxilary language) that is capable of really being one – e.g., simple to learn, uses phonemes that are universal, with simple logical grammar, and some flexibility in usage – in other words, something that only a trained linguist could design.

I’m fascinated with the concept of an international common second-language. Somehow it just strikes me as appealing in some romantic, idealistic way. And Esperanto was the first thing that popped up on the radar.

I was naive enough for a few days that I didn’t really think to research on the general concept of IALs – I had little knowledge of the concept, and thought Esperanto was the de-facto standard. Esperantists certainly market it as such. I found out a couple days ago that – *gasp* – Esperanto’s really terrible by most measures of what an IAL should be – or at least most of the measures available online in a quick google search . There are plenty of critiques online, so I shall not go into the details of it here, but a few good links to consider (they turn up on a quick google):

• Learn Not to Speak Esperanto (highly technical, long)
• Proposed Guidelines for the Design of an Optimal IAL (understandable, also long) – Rick Harrison
• An International Language (critiques several conlangs, proposes Novial as replacement)
  • section on Esperanto (short history & critique; long)

In any case, all this criticism left me with a sour taste for Esperanto. So I started shopping for a different IAL that could withstand a reasonable amount of criticism – something that at least attempts to fulfill the Guidelines posed by Rick Harrison. Novial seems to fulfill a few goals, but it is very under-developed and not spoken by many. I’m not particularly motivated to learn it, but perhaps with further research I will find that it, or some over proposed IAL is satisfactory. It will certainly take a lot of reading to find out, since I’m not really in the loop when it comes to linguistics.

I’m left wondering whether linguists spend much time IALs at all – why doesn’t the general public hear about this topic in the media? The closest most people ever come to this topic is finding Esperanto, of which most of the official sites for this language never discuss alternatives or even the broader concept of an IAL – as if it is the only one that exists. Why isn’t there a big official IAL development project somewhere trying to make a lean, mean, efficient auxlang run by top-notch linguists? Is this a taboo topic for them? Or is there just not sufficient interest or research funds? There doesn’t seem to be any easy answer to these questions.

For now, I am considering mass cc: e-mailing the ISU Language Dept. staff (all the professors) to ask them what they think about IALs/conlangs/auxlangs, to at least get a ‘local’ variety of informed opinions. Currently, the languages offered here are: French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Latin, and Shoshoni. I’ll post the results if I get any responses…

This post is a bit of a departure from the “regular” – if there is such a thing for a blog with only 17 posts so far (18 now). I felt like rambling a bit, so here it is in all its munificent, unedited glory. It’s not short reading, but perhaps someone else out there might like to comment? I’m always open to other thoughts. Anyway, to the post -

I just started reading “Contact: A Novel” by Carl Sagan a few days ago. I feel I should have done this long ago – many of the thoughts I’ve had on the intersection of religion and science, and basic epistomology are in the summary form of a few dialogues of the chapters I’ve read so far. Here are a few of my thoughts on the book, and the critical issue it broaches – how science and religion interact:

• Epistomology

Religion and science, as Palmer Joss claims in “Contact”, have the same aim: the pursuit of truth. This is, in fact, the only reason that they interact at all. They both claim a method, a framework, a mindset, a philosophy for how to make judgments and decisions about what our reality, and morality really are.

Before considering discussion, I shall broadly generalize the two camps of religion and science:

Religion relies upon faith-based, or revelatory truth. Faith is defined as complete trust in an idea for no “reason” whatsoever – it is simply trusted because you choose to trust it. Revelatory truth – a vision received from on high, a spiritual experience – is that which a person feels strongly to be true because they have had that experience. It simply feels right.

Science relies on empiricism – having “solid” reasons for trusting an idea or concept. This is perhaps biased language that makes science sound better. It’s useful verbage though, so I’ll just try to clarify – “solid” refers to having something like a repeatable experiment that confirms a hypothesis (at which point it then becomes a theory – a working explanation of the data). I don’t want to go into a long argument about what is fact, or whether I should trust my sense-data (I’ll write another post on that perhaps), but I just want to get across the idea of having an outside reality that I perceive, in which things can be confirmed by deduction and induction, and what is classically known to be the scientific method. Hopefully this semantic definition is enough for the point.

Fundamentally, science – and perhaps philosophy in general, is concerned with asking ourselves to consider upon what assumptions we place our beliefs, notions, and overarching explanations of all the sense-data we encounter. It does not place absolute trust in anything – rather, a provisional trust. As Bart Kosko wrote in “Fuzzy Thinking”,

“Laws of science state tendencies we have recently observed in our corner of the universe. The best you can say about them is so far, so good.”

It is this provisionalism – somewhat related to relativism, that is the strength of science. Science, at its best, strives to be very clear about what conditions it places upon knowledge – what, fundamentally, you must simply accept in order to also swallow its further explanation of basic facts.

• Belief-Formation

Whenever I think about these subjects, I am always taunted with a haunting paradox: What is the “best” way, the “right” way, or is there even such a thing as best or right? I cannot firmly say that there is such a thing.

I find it difficult to say “I have come to the conclusion” (because I’m not sure), or “It seems” (because this is is pansy writing), or “I think” (because again, I’m not decided one way), so I shall state it bluntly as a position, even though I have none:

I believe that religion and science are a fundamentally different approach to what we call ‘knowledge’. On the one hand, a Christian can say “I know God exists” – and he does, because both on a philosophical and pragmatic level, he is convinced for whatever reason.

On the other hand, an agnostic can say “I don’t know if god(s) exist”, because even though on a pragmatic level he is not convinced of the existence of god(s), on a philosophical level he is willing to admit the possibility of such evidence coming in to play. I describe what is classically known as a nontheist, or weak atheist – someone that sees no evidence for such a belief, but does not withhold the possibility. However, on the pragmatic level, he functions as a nontheist/atheist – e.g., someone who is not concerned with the possible consequences of angering or pleasing a higher deity.

Both of these personal approaches to knowledge – religion and science, absolute trust and provisional trust, lead to what can be logically consistent, coherent systems of thought. All that I can say with any certainty is, they lead down different paths of knowledge, and to different ways of making decisions. Which is better? I don’t know. By what criterion? Should I go by my gut, or by careful analysis? By mixture of the two?

Ah.. that nasty problem of mixing opposites – how would I do this when they are mutually contradictory? They are after – I speak of religion and science as overarching methods of explanation, and in this sense they are complete opposites. Religion is fundamentally something set in stone, and if it is to make empirical claims about the real world, then it is an explanation of such set in stone. Even if you were to make a religion out of current scientific theory, you would at some point be clinging to an out-moded explanation, that requires you to ignore the inevitable new sense-data, and the new theories to explain such phenomena.

At the point where you must fit the data around pre-existing beliefs, or ignore it entirely to preserve the logical coherence of a system of thought, you have reached a point of insanity. It is the point at which you no longer form beliefs because they seem reasonable. You toss out sense-data that would have been acceptable in a time when you were forming beliefs.

In a quick metaphor, religion and science are much like the unbendable oak and the flexible willow – one preserves its ability to conform to the present and the future while continually growing, the other only able to rigidly brace in a form of times past when it was young and impressionable. They both grow, reproduce, die from a terrible storm or simply from long life. They both continue to survive as a species of thought. They are different.

Which do you choose?

I don’t see mixing as much of an option for “logical” consistency. Of course, nothing in the realm of thought-system-formation (belief system?) is usually one way other the other – science requires hunches pulled out of the arse in order to form new theories from old ideas, and religion requires some empirically confirming phenomena of some kind, or at least the convincing appearance of such, in order to sustain beliefs.

In a way, I almost feel presented with a spectrum-binary duality, where science and religion are a mixing of one and the same entity, yet both distinct and opposite in other ways. Hmmm..

You heard it! Commuter Cars will be making produciton models of the Tango – the T100 & T200 in the next few years – 2008 or 2009, depending on how things work out.
They are asking for people to put down deposits for orders a few years in advance so that they will be able to attract investors to help them get the Tangos into production. The T100 – projected retail of $18,700 – which has very respectable specs, only requires a $500 deposit. All deposits are full refundable at any time with no penalty, if you choose to cancel your order.
Admittedly though, ~$19 grand is still pretty steep for a tiny car like the Tango. I think this is really just an initial cost though – once they become more popular and they have been mass produced for a while, this price will probably drop even further. Just speculation though. I’d like to see these in a price range of something more like $4 – 7k – right in the sweet spot for entry level cars for kids (me!).
See Previous post on the Tango from this blog.

There’s lots of writeups today since I’ve been chewing threw a week’s worth of news. To the story:
Torvec’s IVT (Infinitely Variable Transmission) has the following key features (copied directly from their website:

• Fuel economy improvement of 38% in city driving conditions
• Potential weight savings of at least 20% versus 6-speed automatic
• Over 70% fewer parts than 6-speed automatic
• Significantly smaller size than 5-Speed or 6-Speed automatic
• Designed for reliability and durability
• Safety is inherent in design
• Maintenance & service costs minimized in design

Exciting! The website says they’re already putting less-expensive versions into production cars for some companies. You can pretty much switch this transmission in with virtually no change to the design of a vehicle – or little if any.

It seems civil war has officially started (or otherwise been officially noticed) in Iraq. It’s probably flying all around the blogosphere by now, hundreds and thousands of bloggers posting their binary democratic/republican, pro/anti, apathetic/enraged opinions.

All I can say is, it’s sad. I think it’s sad that we still can’t figure out how to quell meaningless violence over what amounts to a pittance – usually religion. Ahhhh, religion – the little intolerant voice in your head that says “go kill your neighbor, because he doesn’t think like you”. I know, I know – this is a perversion of religion. But is it really? Does religion teach people how to think? Not really. It’s good at teaching what, but not how. People are left to fend for themselves when it comes to developing rational/critical thinking skills.

This is a crazy world we live in. A lot of people just seething with resentment for those who dare think different.

Agnoioligist, how did you ever think this war could work?

I just found an entire site dedicated entirely to ePaper news: www.epaper.org.uk

I’ll probably steal bits and pieces from this for my personal archive of relevant news, since such sites usually talk about every little development – I’m only interested in major releases of products or new technology. Just thought I’d share the discovery!

Vital Stats…

name: “iliad” / “Electronic Reader ER 0100″
produced by: iRex Technologies
production stage: finished product; no known release date
cost: ~$790 / 650 euros (rumor)
screen size: 8.1″ diagonal
resolution: XGA (1024 x 768), 16 levels of gray at 160dpi

Features…

Content Formats: PDF, XHTML, TXT, APABI, OEB, mp3
Connectivity: 3.5mm stereo audio jack, WiFi 802.11g, 10/100MB wired LAN, USB (for connecting to a computer)
Built-in Storage: 128MB non-volatile, internal flash memory
Storage Extension options: USB type A connector for USB sticks, CF type II, MMC cards

Sidenote: InfoSyncWorld reports that the Iliad will have 224MB of non-volatile storage. I don’t know where they got this number. I sourced these specs from the official iRex product leaflet (PDF). See the Iliad’s own Product page for more general information.

System Specs…

Processor: 400MHz Intel X-Scale Processor
UI: Touch screen w/ stylus input
Battery: rechargeable. No word on capacity. Purportedly, one charge will last you for reading 3 hours a day for one week – doesn’t give a hard number for page turns. I would guess this is because, unlike the Sony PRS-500, it has true connectivity through WiFi, which drains the battery when transfering data, and has a digitizer for the touch screen which presents a constant drain while its turned on. What I would like to know is if the internal electronics can be switched off individually (WiFi / touch screen / etc.) to reduce battery consumption. It is critical that the principal advantage of ePaper – that no energy is consumed while the screen isn’t being refreshed – be preserved. If the WiFi can’t be turned off while the device is on (say, while browsing stored material), then this device will have a pretty short battery life.

Image sources: Mobilemag, InfoSyncWorld

This is a pretty exciting product! iRex has certainly gone overboard to make this a truly usable display by including a wireless option, as well as being able to connect to a computer and use it as an external display, rather than just something where you can dump content into storage, open the file, and then read. I’m still disappointed that they didn’t do a full size 8.5×11 display (13.9″ diagonal), but this product will have a larger screen than the Sony PRS-500 (6″ diagonal) so it is a move in the right direction.

The only major drawback is the price – roughly the same as the cost of a low end laptop that has integrated WiFi and a standard 15″ screen. The laptop I’m typing this post on – a Compaq Presario M2000 I got on sale last year – cost $550, without integrated WiFi, but in two months there was another sale for a Presario with roughly the same specs, except it had WiFi and a 15.4″ widescreen. To top it off, it cost $100 less than the one I got two months previous (*groan*).

I don’t see this as something that will fly off the shelves – it will probably only be bought by people with too much money on their hands who don’t really need it anyway. Ho-Hum, just have to wait for good ol’ mass production for the price to come down…

Few people may realize it, but there are actually differing technologies at play that want to become the defacto e-paper technology. I had gathered hints of this from various e-paper companies, though because all of them do not typically have an products available for sale directly to consumers, this is not readily apparent.

The main variances in technologies have to do with some important capabilities of paper that we want to simulate: flexibility, and color versus monochrome while preserving high contrast. At the moment, most prototypes are only capable of one of these features – color or flexibility, or just plain inflexible monochrome. There are also e-ink prototypes for video using technology that has the potential for 100 Hz refresh (PDF), though I have yet to see this surface in recent news, and the source article is from 2003.

The only visible product to the public so far is a the rather disappointing Sony PRS-500 that is slated to be available “in Spring of 2006″, I think for around $300. It has a 6″ screen – roughly the size of a paperback, with SVGA 800×600 resolution, and a purported 7500 page turns per battery charge. Personally, I think that if they came out with a standard 8.5×11 size (13.9″ diagonal) device, it would sell like hotcakes – even if the price was in the range of $900 – $1200.

According to BusinessWeek (PDF), however, Hitachi and Fuji Xerox are in the e-paper market and looking to start making “notebook size” monochrome plastic panels. This article is the most recent in-depth news that I have seen in months on E-paper, and I hope some of it’s true, because it hails the soon release of more consumer devices.

There’s more research to be done on this topic, since it seems there are probably a dozen different companies with vastly different technologies trying to get into the market, though unfortunately they seem to be focusing more on the commercial sign business rather than personal reading devices. Perhaps when I have time I’ll do a more thorough write up…

Vital Stats…

name: Loremo LS

production stage: will be available ’soon’

cost: $13,200

0-60mph time: ~20 seconds

modus operandi of energy storage: diesel gasoline

mileage: 157 mpg

efficiency features: lightweight body, streamlined aerodynamic design, low-horsepower engine, thermoplastic moulded outershell (no paint) to achieve desired aerodynamics

unique features: has doors that flip out the front windshield/hood and back trunk (used as a seat or storage), LED headlights, “patented linear cell structure” performs well in crash tests for protecting passengers,

will be available by: 2009, most likely only in Europe / near Bavaria initially

source: The 157 mpg Loremo (Low Resistance Mobility) LS (PDF)

I have attempted to access Loremo’s website (www.loremo.com), however after the intial view that I had it is now giving me 403 errors. I don’t know why. In my initial peek though, I found that they have a foreign language (looked like dutch, I’m not sure), and an english alternate for those that aren’t multilingual.

I’m pretty excited about this car, since there are already pictures that make it look really great – the design and doors are very futuristic and cool – and it really exists. This isn’t just some prototype – they’re going to produce it, hopefully en masse at some point. The Loremo GT is also set to come out a few years after – a more powerful version that gets less MPG (~83) but accelerates much faster. I would stick with the LS though, just for the mileage – nearly 5 times what the average economical car does right now – 30 mpg.

It’s pretty rare for such cars that get phenomenal gas mileage to actually exist and have plans for production, and have such competitive pricing to boot. Granted, it isn’t a 4 seater family car, but once the price lowers this will be a good commuter for the mom/dad that drives 20 miles to work, or the college student that goes on road trips back home and just driving around town on errands.

I hope to be posting some older articles on the weekend regarding high fuel-efficiency concept cars / prototypes that I’ve been hanging on to. This week has been really busy, and I simply don’t have the time to go through the trouble of finding all the sources, pdf-ing and archiving the articles, besides writing the posts. So, if I have any readers out there (doubtful at this point I’m guessing), don’t despair! This blog isn’t dead!

*drool*

HP has just released the Pavilion dv5000t notebook.
Source: Endadget

I, of course, went to HP’s website and used the customize feature to see what it would really cost me if I put in all the features that I want, within reason – I’m not loading a 100 gb hard drive, since I really don’t need one in there.

Customized model price tag: $1,818

Of course, there’s rebates ($100 & $50), taking it down to $1,668, but still pretty hefty. Considering the features though, this is a good buy – won’t be significantly outdated for quite a time, and has all the features necessary for modern computing. I’m sure prices will go down in a few months though, during sales and such (July 4th / Back to School sales).

Features of note for my customized version

• 1.83 ghz Intel Dual-core processor
• 12-cell Li-on battery (purported to have a 7.5 hour lifespan)
• Integrated Wi-Fi & Bluetooth
• 15.4″ WXGA Brightview screen (1280×800 native resolution)
• 1.0gb DDR2 SDRAM (1 stick)
• 60 GB 5400 spin Hard Drive
• LightScribe 8x DVD-RW/CD-RW combo double-layer disc drive
• 128mb NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400

If I ever actually get this, I’ll probably also buy the expansion stand that acts as a recharger / props it up higher to the regular desktop level at some point later on. I wouldn’t want to include this in the price of the laptop though, since it is truly an accessory, and expensive at that – !$250.

I picked the Bluetooth option for this since that enables me to have a wireless mouse and keyboard that don’t require a USB transceiver (keeps things more compact and aesthetic). I’m still looking for an economical (read: inexpensive) bluetooth mouse + keyboard. There don’t seem to be too many bluetooth keyboards out there yet, though I’ve spotted a few. I might add a page later on recommended digital accessories at some point.

I picked the 60gb Hard Drive simply because 40gb tends to be a bit of a limitation, even when you have an external drive to port large media files to for storage (I have a 160gb External from SimpleTech).

I chose the 1-stick of 1gb RAM because it’s always good to have that extra port open for expansion – just in case that extra windfall of $$$ comes my way.

I can hear you already though , “What separates this laptop from the rest of those humdrum, high-performance laptops?” you cry. Well, it has pseudo-instant-on media playback abilities (“HP Quickplay”) – 11 second boot-time, according to Engadget. I’ve looked at a lot of different laptop models from different brands, and this is type of capability is usually reserved for $2,000+ laptops. The base-level price for the dv5000t is ~$1,000 – so even if it doesn’t have all those other great features like 1 gig of ram and a GeForce video card, this would make a kickass portable media player.

Well, enough drooling for now. I don’t know if I’ll be able to afford this, but definitely something I would want to get for going to college if I had the moola.

Thanks to researchers at University of California (Berkeley) who have been working with algae, we may one day be producing hydrogen from solar energy via these tiny organisms.

Wired News’s article on Mutant Algae is Hydrogen Factory (PDF) broke one of the principle rules of scientific research though – they reported this story before the researchers have published a paper on it. Big no-no.

In any case, the researchers are said to be near, or have possibly reached, the 10% efficiency threshold for converting light into hydrogen. They hope to continue breeding new strains and possibly genetically engineer them to produce even more efficiently. The differentiating characteristic in their current strain is “truncated chlorophyll antennae within the chloroplasts”. This makes the algae a lighter shade, allowing more light through each layer of algae, allowing more cells to photosynthesize.

Check for details in the article.. I don’t like reproducing facts in my own garbled writing.

A very interesting tech that has been waiting for a breakthrough in for a long time – previously these cultures were only around 1% efficient or less, according to a Popsci article I read a few years ago..

Who wouldn’t want to have a bookcase that’s really a secret doorway to a hidden room, triggered by pushing in a particular book – ‘like in all the movies’? I would.

Well, now you can – the company Creative Home Engineering will, for just $10 Gs install one of a number of different hidden passageway doors in your house. Or, for the DIYer, you can pay $1500 for a kit that comes with all the pre-wired electronics and mounting hardware you’ll need.

If I ever get a house + a butt-load of money, I’m getting one of these bookcases!

The company’s website has a bunch of cool animations that show the various doors they can install, but it’s all flash-based 3d models (not video of actual, real-life installations). Pooh.

Tipped off by: Boing Boing

Konarka Technologies has been around for a while (created circa 2001) as a company that has been researching solar cells made almost entirely of plastic. Back in early May 2005, however, Konarka signed a deal with the U.S. Army (PDF) to produce solar cells that will be incorporated into their regular gear, thus lessening the need for soldiers to lug around rechargeable batteries or having to worry about where the next power outlet is coming from.

Since its initial deal with the US Army, it has raised additional venture capital (PDF) with other companies. The referenced article is dated 02-14-06, so it’s fairly recent. I’m not going to go into detail about this, since there’s plenty of information in the references.

This plastic solar cell technology is unique in that it is all plastic, and can have patterns (e.g., camoflauge) printed on it without reducing its power-production capabilities. It can also be transparent, and thus can be simply integrated into regular products such as cell phones or laptops, though at this time they are not selling any products to the general public. Best of all, these solar cells can be made using existing print-roll technology with a few modifications, and are low-cost because they are plastic.

Something else unique about this “power plastic” is that it purportedly can absorb wavelengths outside the normal range of its silicon counterparts – into the infrared, and possibly ultraviolet. However, Konarka’s webpage is a bit skimpy on specifics as to how efficient the cells are at absorbing light or what the actual range of wavelengths is that it can absorb (usually stated in nanometers). A bit disappointing that they don’t provide more details, but oh well..

My Prediction: will be in the market within 10-15 years – as with everything else I’ve been predicting lately, I guess.

I think the main roadblock is that this tech will be heavily patented and thus have high royalties – consequently raising the initial purchase price for consumers when it gets on the market.

It seems that the majority of the articles I’m reporting right now are somewhat old.. but the older articles will help me build up an itemized log of all the significant tech that’s coming in the next few years. I’m sure most of what is mentioned here will have news off and on..

Nanotech promises the first viable alternative to batteries in 200 years (PDF)

Another application of carbon nanotubes, this would make capacitors comparable to a similarly sized battery. Current tech for capacitors makes them 25 times bigger than the same size battery, and a lot more expensive. Carbon nanotubes can be mass manufactured, and once they get to market, I think costs will go way down. Nonetheless, this will probably not be mainstream for another 10-15 years.

A new breed of high performance electric car (PDF)

The “Tango”, marketed by Commuter Cars Corporation will cost $108k for the first high-performance model that they’ll be selling, the Tango T600. Worse yet, this is a kit – not even a car you can buy off the lot. This is essentially a car that wants to be a motorcycle – it’s roughly the same size, but protects you from the elements because of the enclosure, and has a second passenger seat area for a small payload or second person.

I like this car’s design – it’s electric, has a decent range that will be improved by future battery tech, and it’s well-designed for safety – a low center of gravity and a carbon fiber shell that will protect passengers in the event of a crash. It can accelerate from 0 to 60mph in 4 seconds – a first for these sort of vehicles. My only concern is that it would be easily tipped over in high winds. Other than that, the only downer is the price-tag, but they will be releasing lower-performance models in a few years (2008-9) that will be priced sub-$20k. I think they’ll have to price it sub-$10k if they really want to sell’em though.

My prediction: I’ll be buying one in a decade.

MIT develops new fast-charging battery technology ideal for automobiles (PDF)

The first viable Li-on battery for cars! Li-on was previously unsafe for vehicles because of a risk of explosion from overheating when implemented in large sets (e.g., for electric vehicles). We don’t generally have this problem with smaller batteries used in laptops/cameras, etc..

This new tech uses lithium nickel-manganese oxide, which is known to have potential for holding a lot of energy and is more stable than conventional Li-on batteries. The only problem was a slow recharge rate due to a messy crystal structure. A new manufacturing process that creates a more orderly crystal allowed for very fast charging time (~10 minute quick charge, ~3 hour trickle), solving the major problem of this type of battery chemistry. The only roadblock in place at this time is refining the manufacturing process so that it is lower cost.

My prediction: 5-10 years before it will be in the market.

This tech should work together very nicely with the Tango in extending range and quickening recharge time. Combining this tech in the next decade or so should make this the most popular commuter car out there, if the Moovie doesn’t get there first.

I was just browsing gizmag and found that a sectional RSS feed, ecoGizmo, does work in Feedreader.

It has quite a bit of interesting tech listed, but is not oft updated – I haven’t seen new articles in quite a few days. The next few posts are some articles I found in the feed.

a blog for my random thoughts and writing urges!

topics will probably include alternative energy news updates, random cool websites (I should probably be tagging them on Stumbler too, but I’m lazy..), etc..

And BTW, glork is a real word.

Used in a sentence: Let’s hope my computer doesn’t glork itself while I write this post…

Oh.. and I just can’t help mentioning it: this layout template is absolutely gorgeous. Way better than the bloated ones at Blogger. I only happened to find this one because Atariboy uses it as well. I hate being a copycat, but I haven’t figured out how you’re supposed to customize these things yet.

I’ll probably end up gakking a bunch of stuff from my other favorite feeds: Boing Boing, Reuters’ Oddly Enough, Engadget, and Wired News. I also like gizmag’s website, but for some reason their main, all-inclusive RSS feed doesn’t work. I can’t figure out why – maybe incompatibility with Feedreader (my favorite text RSS client). Not necessarily copying word for word the story posted (as gak implies), but really just aggregating the stories that I thought were interesting in a given day from all these feeds together.